How the engineer should market him/herself in the 21st century

Alessandro Alessandrini writes in his blog,

It hurts to see many skilled professionals using a “bad” CV to present themselves. It hurts employers as they do not consider into their selection process all the right candidates.

I agree.

What troubles me, though, is that what constitutes a bad (or good) CV is very subjective.

Even if you were able to get any two CV-reviewers to agree on the definition of a good CV, I’d bet money that given the same pile of CV’s to review, they’d end up with different shortlists.

Similarly, I bet that they’d come up with different shortlists on different days. One day, they’re in good moods. But another day . . . . . . might be Monday. Sheesh, will ya look at these CV’s? Give me strength . . . .

Human beings are inherently erratic and unpredictable. And undefinable. You cannot boil one human being’s skills and abilities down to two sheets of A4.

Nor can you have any confidence that the really good candidates will necessarily have the written communication skills to catch my eye 24-7, irrespective of my mood.

(And some would add: HR and recruiter types are notoriously bad at interpreting the CV in light of the manager’s real needs. I say that with all due apologies to the really good HR and recruiters out there – I know you exist.)

No, the really troubling thing for me is that in the 21st Century, we’re still relying on the CV to net us the talent we need.

It was adequate in the 80’s and 90’s. Jobs were scarce, companies were downsizing, and the ratio of vacancies to applicants favoured the employer.

Employers had the luxury of knowing that if they couldn’t see what they wanted quickly on your CV, there were 500 more right behind you. You might be exactly what they needed, but they could afford to lose you in the pile. There would be another good candidate in the pile somewhere.

The CV was a convenient, if inhuman way of cutting down the size of the task and finding the quickest possible solution.

But even in these harder economic times, that luxury has gone. Demographic realities and social media have flattened the playing field somewhat.

However, the same social media tools make it easier for talent-seekers to spread their net wider and more specifically at the same time.

If you’re short of talent, you should be using LinkedIn groups and webinars to build relationships with potential recruits, including ones you don’t even know you want yet.

Recognise that future employees are people. Not a set of skills.

And if you’re out of work, or just plain restless, start blogging about what you’ve done. Start an open-source project. Create an online community around an interest, professional or otherwise. Post Youtube videos featuring your projects. Follow online the companies you’re interested in, an post to their blogs and groups. Don’t delete your CV, because there will always be some old guy somewhere who insists on it. But for heaven’s sake, don’t rely on it.

The companies are people too.

All the tools exist for enabling hands and gloves to meet. What’s missing is effort, and acceptance of how the world has changed.

Kelly Johnson’s 14 Rules – Updated

Kelly Johnson is one of the legends of the aircraft design industry. He combined technical savvy is several disciplines with inspirational leadership of his team and single-minded focus on the task at hand. His accomplishments are adequately described elsewhere, but one bears reconsidering: Kelly Johnson’s 14 Rules.

I have never had the good fortune to work in a team that operated by the 14 rules. That’s primarily because they fly in the face of what’s supposedly modern wisdom about how teams should be run. It’s also because, frankly, they were written in a 1960’s US military aerospace culture that doesn’t really exist any more.

As they are excellent principles, I thing they deserve to be rewritten to bring them up-to-date. Here’s how I read them. Tell me what you think.

1. The chief engineer and programme manager should be one and the same individual, with the talent and responsibility for technical, financial, political and people aspects of the project.  He/She is responsible for the success of the project, and reports to senior company management.
2. No more than two people should be required to make any decision having a significant effect on the success of the project. Any more causes decision paralysis.
3. The team should have a few superbly talented people, rather than many good or mediocre ones. The project is not a job creation programme. If deadlines start slipping, don’t add more bodies to the critical tasks, reduce the number of bodies and allow them to focus.
4. Use the right tools for the job. Provide a few excellent tools that give the hands-on engineer the flexibility to make his/her own tools if necessary.
5. Paperwork matters. Progress and key decisions must be recorded in a simple and concise fashion. If the paperwork rate starts rising, you’ve got too many people on the project. Place a cap on the wordcount of any document.
6. Bean counting matters too, but only for the important beans. On a regular basis (and monthly is good), communicate to everyone how much financial room there is to finish the job.
7. Push design authority and creativity down the chain. Concentrated authority is a bottleneck that slows progress and stifles enthusiasm. Remove control freaks.
8. Do what inspection you think is necessary. Let your suppliers do what inspection they think is necessary. If you can’t trust your own people and suppliers, why are they on the programme?
9. The project must be from initial requirements, through concept, detailed design, manufacture, flight test, delivery, to support of the customer. Otherwise, no knowledge is gained.
10. Do thorough requirements first. Then design. In that order. Take the time to get the requirements right.
11. Cash is the lifeblood of any project and any company. Identify the project milestones and the desired end product, then line up enough cash to see the project through to completion. Otherwise, don’t start. Bear in mind that things will go wrong, and unexpected costs will occur.
12. Trust is the emotional lifeblood of the project, both within the project team, and between project team and the customer. Keep short accounts. When trust is broken, take quick and decisive action to restore it. Quickly remove from the team people that repeatedly threaten this trust.
13. There are only two kinds of people in the world: Project insiders, and outsiders. You are in or you are out. A project thrives on stability, of people and of information.
14. People who make superlative contributions to the project must be rewarded in the way that suits them, irrespective of responsibility level. Otherwise, you kill trust and enthusiasm. See Rule 12.

How to get people to pay attention to a safety briefing

Or Anything Else That’s Boring, for that matter.

The secret is simple: Tell them something they’re absolutely not expecting and not wanting to hear.

Yesterday, a mate and I drove 90 minutes into south Wales for what was expected to be an afternoon of gorge climbing. It had sounded delightful when I booked it. We’d done some climbing last spring up in north Wales, some 1000-metre hills in Snowdonia. Really fun stuff. Gorge climbing sounded pretty tame in comparison.

I should have twigged when the email came that confirmed our booking and asked my height and weight, so’s they’d have an appropriate wetsuit.

It’s amazing how the mind can filter out stuff it doesn’t want to hear.

We showed up at noon on the dot. Stunning October colours were on the Welsh hillsides, as we crossed a fast-flowing river to our destination. Stu, our guide for the event, handed us our wetsuits.

OK, so maybe we’ll be climbing near some waterfalls, and might get a little wet. Fair enough.

For those who’ve never tried it, getting into a wetsuit resembles trying to put on shoes that are two sizes too small for you, only this time, you’re doing it with your whole body. After enduring this anguish for twenty minutes, we had finally shoehorned our way into them.

Stu then handed us lifejackets and helmets.

Alarm bells start tinkling somewhere aft of my cranium. Didn’t know there were going to be boats involved.

With lifejackets and helmets donned, “OK, just a quick safety briefing. When we get to the river’s edge, the water is really cold and fast. Don’t dive in, just jump in with your butt down and try to keep your hands and feet in the air. Wait until the water calms down where you can see that rock downstream. Then you’ll be able to stand up and slowly move to shore.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Rewind. Rewind.

Jump in?

Canuck though I be, and theoretically therefore used to cold, I’m not crazy.

“The water will be cold, so just try to concentrate on breathing steadily once you’ve come to the surface.”

“When we come to climb up the waterfalls, if the current makes you slip, try not to put your hands down, use your feet if possible. And when we do some jumping off the waterfalls, jump where you see me jump, because some of the pools have shallow ledges, and you don’t want to go in there. Ready? Let’s go.”

The alarm bells are ringing shrilly now. It’s not a cold day, but we crossed that river just before arrival, and I didn’t notice any steam rising from the surface. I have signed up for a fool’s errand, but that thing known as the Masculine Ego was now staring me in the face. Are you man or are you mouse?

With my nose twitching, and visions of small cheese chunks entering my mind, I dumbly follow my guide and my Masculine Ego down the lane.

C’mon boy, you’re a Canuck, you can take cold better than any Brit.

We’ve reached the river’s edge.

Drat. He really isn’t kidding. Kimbell, you fool.

To cut to the chase, we did jump in, and had a riproaring time for the next three hours . . . . caving, fording up some very fast current waterfalls, jumping into eddy pools, climbing rocks, and generally behaving like the teenagers we haven’t been for a long, longtime. The water was viciously cold, and we were cold for three hours, most of the time feeling neither hands nor feet. And nothing prepares you for the shock of that first leap in. But after you’ve floated downstream, crawled out, and then jump in again . . . . the mouse turns adrenalyn junkie. And you wanna.

On the way home in the car (with the heat on full blast), I reflected on that safety briefing at the start.

Seldom has anybody gotten my attention quite so quickly.

I wonder if they could employ this technique in the safety briefings they give on airliners, without any humourless passenger suing?