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Bill's Top Ten List of Things to Assist You in Your Engineering
Career
- You can learn something from everybody. Never think that you're
smarter than anybody else out there.
- Take care of your secretaries. Secretaries can make or break your
career. They can help you out.
- You can't succeed without communication skills, no matter how
smart you are, if you can't convey your knowledge to the next
person you will never succeed.
- Attitude, keeping a positive attitude and working hard will keep
you employed longer than any technical skills will.
- Learn your technical limitations. As Engineers everybody knows
that there's a vast amount of knowledge out there and we don't
know all of it. Knowing when to say 'when,' knowing when to make
the phone call to somebody smarter than you is a very important
skill.
- Do whatever it takes to get the job done. If that involves working
on things that are a little bit out of your expertise, or what
you think are beneath you, you've still got to do it. You've got
to push yourself, not say, 'I'm an Engineer, I don't do those
things.' Do what it takes to get the job done.
- Keep your commitments. If you tell your boss you're going to have
it done by five o'clock on Friday, have it done by five o'clock
on Friday, period. No excuses.
- Your reputation is your most valuable asset. One of the reasons
that we are successful in our business is because people think
we're good and we do everything possible to hold up our end of
the bargain, that we are good.
- Burn no bridges. Inevitably you will deal with people in your
career who you don't like but it's a valuable lesson to learn,
how to work with them because sometime in the future you may need
their help and burn no bridges, keep everybody happy that you
can.
- Finally, the most important thing is that life is short. Enjoy
what you do and do what you enjoy. My corollary to that is that
Materials Engineering is fun.
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