Life After...Engineering and Built Environment: A practical guide to life after your degree

212 Pages·2006·0.99 MB·English

by  Sally Longson

Life After …
Engineering and
Built Environment
Thousands of students graduate from university each year. The
lucky few have the rest of their lives mapped out in perfect detail
– but for most, things are not nearly so simple. Armed with your
hard-earned degree the possibilities and career paths lying before
you are limitless, and the number of choices you suddenly have to
make can seem bewildering.
Life After … Engineering and Built Environment has been written
specifi cally to help students currently studying, or who have recently
graduated, make informed choices about their future lives. It will be
a source of invaluable advice and wisdom to graduates (whether you
wish to use your degree directly or not), covering such topics as:
(cid:138) Identifying a career path that interests you – and how to start
pursuing it
(cid:138) The worldwide opportunities open to engineering graduates
(cid:138) Staying motivated and pursuing your goals
(cid:138) Networking and self-promotion
(cid:138) Making the transition from scholar to worker
(cid:138) Putting the skills you have developed at university to good use
in life
The Life After … series of books are more than simple ‘career
guides’. They are unique in taking a holistic approach to career
advice – recognising the increasing view that, although a successful
working life is vitally important, other factors can be just as essential
to happiness and fulfi lment. They are the indispensible handbooks
for students considering their future directionin life.
Sally Longson is a life coach and well-known writer and media
commentator in the fi eld of careers.
Also available from Sally Longson
Life After … Art and Design
0-415-37590-8
Life After … Business and Administrative Studies
0-415-37591-6
Life After … Language and Literature
0-415-37593-2
Life After …
Engineering and
Built Environment
A practical guide to life
after your degree
Sally Longson
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2006 Sally Longson
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or repro-
duced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopy-
ing and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Longson, Sally
Life after – engineering and built environment: a practical guide to
life after your degree / Sally Longson. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Vocational guidance. 2. College graduates – Employment
3. Career development.
I. Title. II. Title: Practical guide to life after your degree.
HF5381.L6574 2006
650.1–dc22 2006001067
(PrintEdition)
ISBN10: 0–415–37592–4
ISBN10: 0–203–08843–3
ISBN13: 978–0–415–37592–4
Contents
Preface vii
1 Decisions, decisions … 1
2 Creating your career 15
3 Working out ‘how to’ 33
4 Connecting with your network: the world’s a network 51
5 Hunting out the right opportunity 69
6 Proving yourself: from scholar to worker 85
7 Promoting and selling yourself 105
8 What’s stopping you? Make it happen! 122
9 Moving on … Your future 135
10 Here’s to life! 156
Further reading 167
Useful addresses and further information 171

Preface
Your degree over – or nearly over – you contemplate your next
move, rather like a game of chess. You plot your next move, you fall
into it, or someone makes you fall into it. Life is continually like a
game of chess, but check-mate is entirely where you – or someone
else – decides where it is to be. You can plan to move forward and
make progress, or you can feel like a pawn, moved around a board
at someone else’s bidding.
There’s plenty of good news about. A survey recently conducted
by the Survey Shop and commissioned by the Royal Bank of Scot-
land provided optimistic results for you. Out of the 1,220 people
polled who completed their studies in 2002, those who had gone
into engineering were most satisfi ed – engineers had an overall score
of 69 per cent, taking into account work–life balance, training and
scope for promotion. The numbers of women in the sector are in-
creasing – of nearly two million in the UK working in the construc-
tion industry, for example, 200,000 of them are women.
Engineering and the built environment sectors offer opportuni-
ties which are challenging and varied, and facilitate huge personal
and career growth, whilst offering the chance to reach management
levels at home and abroad. They also enable you to leave a true
mark on the world and make a real difference, from the environ-
ment to space exploration, from the way we work, live and play to
the way we travel. Your end results will bring you the satisfaction of
knowing that you helped build something which will last for many
years ahead. In short, you can make a real difference to the earth we
inhabit and its wider place in space.
As engineers and built environment specialists, you have a very
exciting future ahead indeed and one in which you can make a huge
impact on the world, people and organisations around you. With
your knowledge, skills and ability to pull projects together, you have
viii Preface
the power to create a new world, more so than graduates of any
other subject. Combine these with powerful business acumen and
fl air, creativity and inspiration, a fi rm eye on the bottom line and
excellent interpersonal skills, the opportunities before you will be
all the greater – if you create the right environment and recipe for
success. In this ever smaller world, it is more important than ever
for us all to be able to live and work across borders and to talk to
and empathise with people from other countries. Add a working
language or two to your portfolio of skills, and your world will
explode with opportunities.
There are several tiers of skills demanded to succeed in the sector
and get to the top, so look to develop them as your career progress-
es:
(cid:138) technical expertise and knowledge;
(cid:138) business acumen and understanding;
(cid:138) interpersonal soft skills and the ability to handle people and
motivate them.
The further you want to climb the career ladder in organisations,
the more important the second and third will be, as you acquire
posts in management, directorships and then, much later, appoint-
ments at Board level. Seek to push back the boundaries in all three
within your own capabilities, just as you would push back bounda-
ries of knowledge to invent a product. At all three levels, you’re
continually learning. The rules and regulations laid down by the
professional bodies ensure that this is so. Yet should you decide to
take your knowledge out of the sector, either immediately after your
degree or later in your career, employers will welcome your ability
to project manage, communicate, solve problems and lead teams.
The global economy has led employers to outsource huge amounts
of work to other parts of the world and form partnerships, alliances
and mergers with others to give them a global stage. It means that
the country which secures the Olympic Games in 2016 may recruit
engineers and construction workers from anywhere in the world.
The lower skilled may come from local areas, but who knows where
the companies with the contract, expertise and right sums to build
stadiums, hotels, motorways and improve transport will come from.
Be alert to the potential possibilities out there across the world;
don’t limit your horizons to home shores. Look out across the hori-
zons before you and cast your mind and eyes beyond. And be ready
Preface ix
to compete for career roles and contracts. Competing for your fi rst
employer and that all-important fi rst role will be just the start.
Having a degree does not guarantee having a good job, although
your prospects are better than most, particularly if you’ve got a
good stint of work experience behind you. Nothing in life guaran-
tees you a job. But there are key strategies you can enlist to enhance
your chances of enjoying the career and life you want. This book
will help you to identify them. You can continue to delve into its
pages long after you graduate, because many of the exercises are
designed to be timeless, enabling you to re-visit them in your life
after your degree.
You may land yourself a job – but if you want a great job, you
need to put persistent effort into ensuring that every day is a good
day, that you’re thinking long term and not to pay day and that
you’re giving back as opposed to just taking pay, perks and offi ce
coffee. Careers, like any relationships in life, need nurturing, and
the hard work really only begins when you’ve started them. It is
persistent hard work, which needs continual boosting, but it’s worth
it. Those who persist in their striving for a better career and life
will succeed in enjoying one; those who give up along the way will
take on a life which is of lesser quality than they could have and
deserve. This is all the more important when you consider that there
is expected to be a signifi cant increase in the numbers of managers,
professional occupations, association professional and technical oc-
cupations, and personal service occupations, especially in teaching
and research and science, business and public service. The world is
your oyster if you’re prepared to put in the work for it and create
your own luck.
A degree of humility and humbleness helps. You may be a gradu-
ate, but particularly if you are one without any work experience,
you will need to be prepared to start at the beginning – or, to put
it another way, the bottom – and work your way up. This is not an
easy thing to acknowledge as you celebrate your new status as a
degree holder, but such is life. Be passionate, be interested, be in-
volved and be active. Ask questions, talk to people, be friendly and
interested. They are where you may want to be.
Whatever stage you are at, a new graduate or someone who is
about to graduate, now is a great time to assess your life and what
you want out of it. Use the exercises in this book to help you de-
termine just that. Careers are only part of life – there are a whole
host of other things which are also important, such as relationships,