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Life After Engineering School By PAT JANOWSKI

“In school, you learn the science and apply the equations,” says Carl Selinger. But there’s plenty more to a successful engineering career than that. Accordingly, Selinger’s new book, Stuff You Don’t Learn in Engineering School: Skills for Success in the Real World [Wiley-IEEE Press, New York, 2004] serves as an inspiring guide to all the rest—the non-technical, real world skills that can help engineers better manage their lives and careers.

Written in an informal, engaging style—with revealing quotes from working engineers sprinkled throughout the book—Stuff You Don’t Learn in Engineering School evolved from Selinger’s engineering and teaching career. The book is based on material he developed for seminars he has been conducting for the past 10 years. Selinger is most concerned about the so-called “soft skills” that he finds are not taught in the typical engineering school and are not always part of early career experiences. These include such skills as decision-making, negotiating, running meetings, setting priorities, and working as part of a team. “Nobody is talking to young engineers about these kinds of things,” he says.

“Too many times I’ve seen people 10 to15 years into their career, and they’ve been pigeonholed,” he says. “They’re nervous about being laid off and starting somewhere new because they worry that they don’t have skills for dealing with people, setting priorities, and managing difficult situations.” Selinger suggests using the book as a handy desk reference: it contains plenty of quick tips on skills that range from setting meetings and writing better to dealing with stress and having fun. Managers might also send an employee off to read a chapter or two to brush up on a needed skill.

Each chapter opens with a compelling anecdote and goes on to discuss techniques for solving workplace issues. In the chapter on decision-making, Selinger presents an easy four-step process for making decisions. Then he gets to the heart of why many are not comfortable making decisions—they fear making a bad one. He notes further that Western culture offers no immediate rewards for being decisive, despite this quality being a prized attribute in managerial and professional realms.

Susana Redrovan, an engineer at Intel Corp. in Oregon, USA, praises Selinger’s decision-making advice. “He doesn’t tell you what to do,” she says, “he tells you what to consider when making your decisions. Just because it’s a big decision you are making doesn’t mean your thought process has to get all complicated—you must realize it’s just another decision.” She has participated in Selinger’s seminars, and credits his sense of humor and no-nonsense presentation with making his material especially accessible. “He gets straight to the point.”

Setting priorities can be particularly difficult for young engineers. “Engineers are less equipped than the average professional to deal with their lives,” says Selinger. “When engineering students finish school, their lives have been so ordered with courses, they’ve been, in effect, buried alive in the “boot camp” of engineering school. They must be weaned from having professors set their priorities, to a world where they need to know how to sort their tasks.”

Every engineer has to live through school and come out the other end, according to Selinger. “Engineers have very prized technical skills,” he notes. But the engineers who do well will know how to handle those soft skills like dealing with budgets, and interacting with lots of different kinds of people. They can get a head start with Stuff You Don’t Learn in Engineering School: Skills for Success in the Real World.

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