Daniel Pink’s 2018 book When has a slew of insights regarding time and how it can be better managed. At around 200 pages with short chapters, ample scientific references and tips, the book is a fast read and provides plenty of food for thought. Definitely put it on your reading list, as it might have impactful steps for your life and day.

This post is not a review per se but rather an expansion of four ideas he presents in his Chapter 3 Time Hacker’s Handbook – intermissions of sorts that he provides laden with actionable steps related to the topics in each full chapter. Bundled in that chapter are Four Tips for Making a Fast Start in a New Job. Several of these are related to things I’ve noted about new engineers and how their initial period at a firm can be made more productive and reputation-enhancing.

His four research-backed recommendations are:

  1. Begin before you begin
  2. Let your results do the talking
  3. Stockpile your motivation
  4. Sustain your morale with small wins

Let’s take Pink’s topics and delve into how they may apply specifically for an engineering setting.

1. Begin before you begin

From the book:

…It’s hard to get a fast start when your self image is stuck in the past. By mentally picturing yourself “becoming” a new person even before you enter the front door, you’ll hit the carpet running…So as you think about your new role, don’t forget to see how it connects to the bigger picture.

Rare will be the job where you are hired and then begin the next day. Rather, if there is an interval between your hiring notification and when you walk in the door, use that to perform some more detailed research on what the company is like, their history, who the key players/coworkers are (probably at least several of your interviewers), their histories, reputation and how you will fit in to enhance the overall efforts. You will have done research on the company prior to your interviews, so you already know its mission and capabilities.

Now delve deeper into their table of organization and see if you can find corporate white papers, LinkedIn articles or publications from the people on your future team. Immersing yourself into their body of work will help you visualize your own potential projects, roles, purposes and value that you will deliver, and help you see how it connects to the bigger picture for the company. It’s like reading the textbook for a class before the first day; no rule against that. May not absorb 100% of the content immediately but topics will be more relatable when you do meet them formally.

At the same time your familiarity with relevant works will give you a friendly link to individuals by being able to converse about their contributions to the field, likely giving your reputation a bump up. This goes beyond simply new hire mechanics and can be widely applied to other settings.

A lot of new engineers are nervous about attending classes, trade shows, conferences or business meetings. How will they relate to people there, have conversations, what will their role be, how can they add value? In advance of the event you often have a conference agenda, list of attendees; sometimes access to abstracts from talks or papers. Do some research in advance on these themes and people and find out some backstory. Envision yourself circulating and asking them about their projects; finding relatable ways their product or work may connect with your personal or company’s needs. It is a highly powerful compliment and conversation opener to know a priori something about a person and presumably what topics are dear to their heart. By doing so you create a new, engaging, productive persona with that advance effort: beginning before you begin.

2. Let your results do the talking

From the book:

A new job can be daunting because it requires establishing yourself in the organization’s hierarchy. Many individuals overcompensate for their initial nervousness and assert themselves too quickly and too soon…So, at the outset, concentrate on accomplishing a few meaningful achievements, and once you’ve gained status by demonstrating excellence, feel free to be more assertive.

It’s true that new hire engineers, in this specialized and demanding profession, take some time (months? years?) to get up to speed on the job. In the engineering field where technical acumen coupled with experience is especially prized over raw talent, it can be an intimidating environment to become acclimated for someone fresh and surrounded by grizzled veterans. The reaction to that stressor often goes one of two ways: excessive timidity or overly defensive assertions, often on esoteric technical matters that really have no bearing on the job at hand. This can be more difficult if you are fairly book smart. As a nervous young engineer my hedgehog strategy was to duel senior engineers on fine and non-applicable bookish points of thermodynamics, which is in retrospect amusingly silly. I still do it fairly often but generally laugh at myself in the act to relieve the atmosphere for everyone.

Acknowledging as Pink does that there is this tendency is the first step to overcoming it. Abject shyness is not the countermeasure either. You are there for a purpose, thus you need to step in, learn, make mistakes and contribute. Otherwise they would have hired a potted plant.

A tactic that may help both with the spirit of visualizing a new role and to avoid early over-assertiveness could be to absorb the spirit of Columbo. Now, you’d have to watch several episodes of this classic TV show to get the gist, but basically Columbo is a disheveled, polite and absent minded-appearing detective that in fact is highly intelligent and productive. He spends most of his time laying low, asking oblique questions and collecting information, in some cases letting people walk over him, but at the end comes up with some brilliant coup de main. No one ever accuses him of being overly assertive. All he does is get the job done. So let your results do the talking.

Plus he gets to drive this (Wikimedia)

3. Stockpile your motivation

From the book:

On your first day in a new role, you’ll be filled with energy. By day thirty? Maybe less so. Motivation comes in spurts – which is why Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg recommends taking advantage of “motivation waves” so you can weather “motivation troughs.”

I confess in the book this paragraph appeared without what seemed to be a lot of build-up or research background to this specific point; a bit out of the blue other than the fact Chapter 3 is about “beginnings.” It makes sense that new hires are excited about their start, but may need to be reminded that their work is a marathon, not a sprint.

Engineering, even if you are well suited to it, can be hard work. There are the high points of starting on the high-level conceptual designs of a power plant, where you have a great deal of control over major design criteria. Wave a pen and turbines and vessels appear, are resized and reconfigured. Commissioning is a high point, when the effort of months and years comes to fruition when the generator breaker is synchronized and your plant output flows to the population. In between can be a lot of grind-em-out calculations and sweaty time in boots and hardhats. So understand that there can be lulls and dulls in between the peaks.

It’s not really my place to critique a writer of Pink’s superior skills but in this case the point seems worthy of more elaboration and discussion in the book than it received. If Motivation Waves (or particles?) are of interest however you can read/listen more about them here.

4. Sustain your morale with small wins

From the book:

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile…found that the single largest motivator was making progress in meaningful work. Wins needn’t be large to be meaningful. When you enter a new role, set up small “high-probability” targets and celebrate when you hit them. They’ll give you the motivation and energy to take on more daunting challenges further down the highway.

Any job requires some time to find your feet, but for specialized fields like engineering especially it takes ages to learn your industry and company’s codes, standards and practices: weeks, months and years. New engineers are usually not placed in roles where they bring in clients and work, so it can be something of a powerless feeling to sit there and wait to be delegated work by others, like a chick waiting to be fed by a mother hen. So what are several “high-probability” wins that you can engineer for yourself?

4.a Take what training is available, online or otherwise.

You may suffer under the illusion that your company knows and will direct you perfectly regarding your career arc and what you should study. That likely is not 100% true, although you can probably get some tips from coworkers. As an example from my particular field, this book and course on piping design is a good primer for young engineers and designers; studying it or taking the associated online course might be a productive spare time filler. Organizations such as the military or your company may have a plethora of online internal resources you can peruse.

Waiting around for work, despite your efforts to go out and get some from internal or external clients? Consider taking a relevant class. Worst case, it can help to bolster your CV.

4.b Contribute via your adept organizational skills.

You may discover that senior engineers tend to focus more on big picture issues (project management, business development) and less time with minutia such as running meetings effectively or keeping their areas from looking anything like Rat Nests. Even if you are still getting up to speed on technical matters, it is of great benefit to have someone with organizational abilities that can take detailed meeting minutes (alert and fast typists) or clean up electronic or physical technical libraries so they are accessible/useful. Being around meetings and actively participating to some degree, or reviewing and sorting literature, will help you accumulate knowledge via osmosis.

4.c Contribute your reviewing/editing skills.

Let’s say you are invited to a document/drawing review meeting where you know very little about the project or deliverables. You just started, after all! Might not even be in your discipline. How can you be expected to add value? Well, start at the most fundamental level – are there typos? Are the fonts consistent? Are there gaps in drawing lines? Is the document in accordance with the industry/company’s standards? What are the company’s standards, and where would you find them? Is there a QA/QC checklist that can help you with identifying rudimentary things to check?

A hint here is that the language and aesthetic skills of most engineers and designers are somewhere between abysmal and mediocre; thus if your eye for such matters is even above average, you’ll be doing them a service by improving the quality of their work. Over time as you become more familiar with the nature of the deliverables you will be able to comment on higher level aspects, but for starters, for each sheet of paper you review, consider it your personal mission to find one thing that could be upgraded. (Without making yourself too much of a nuisance, if the comment is absolutely trivial and can be kept to yourself.)

4.d Contribute your software aptitude.

Another weakness of senior engineers is that over time they can spend less and less time being familiar with the in-depth computer analyses in their fields, so new talents are continually needed. There are analysis tools that your department will use regularly or infrequently. Get to know what those are, download them and find opportunities to learn and practice these as relevant for your potential work. A few selected examples of these tools for various disciplines in the plant design space might be:

  • Architectural – BIM software (e.g. Revit)
  • Civil/Structural – structure analysis (e.g STAAD or Inventor)
  • Mechanical – hydraulics modeling (e.g. Pipe-Flo), stress analysis (e.g. CAESAR II)
  • Electrical – circuit and cable analysis (e.g. ETAP)
  • Controls – programming in your company/client’s style of choice (e.g. Allen-Bradley)
  • General – drafting tools such as AUTOCAD, cost estimating tools, higher level functions in Excel (e.g. VBA), higher level plotting tools, scheduling software (e.g. MS Project).

Usually everyone is so busy they are happy to find at minimum a warm body that can pitch in on a project, but even more pleased to find someone that is more “shovel-ready” to get a rapid tutorial and be given a project-specific assignment that might involve using software such as these. Getting a head start early on something you may have a natural aptitude for can rapidly help you carve out a niche for yourself and give you an in on upcoming projects.

An easy sequence of small wins can then be loading the software, working through some self-directed training, developing some sample examples from previous projects on your own (which will help you learn the workflow and key assumptions), receiving some mentoring from mid-level engineers, and then applying it on real projects. Build a couple stacks of wins and you can be a go-to girl for that specific software package.

Summary

As for most excellent works, I wish I’d read When years ago, albeit difficult with a copyright date of 2018. It is loaded with actionable suggestions soundly and compactly based on the underlying science. There are several other key findings worth touching on in the future related to structuring one’s days for maximum productivity. Hopefully this post has described how one small snippet of those can be related specifically to young engineer acclimation in a new technical position. Do check out the entire book if you get the opportunity.