Engineers and Liberal Art majors ( does that mean career changer) have one thing in common…they often suffer from paralysis by analysis. We can’t seem to figure each other out at times.
An engineer is a streamlined job seeker who is emboldened with a sense of mastery and specific training. They can go into a company that has disarray and turnover and see how to prioritize their workload.
They can work in seclusion and be sure that their projects have a beginning, middle and an end.
The career changer does not often understand that they can shape their destiny through more education and more certifications to set themselves apart from other candidates. They suffer from the classic “inch deep, mile wide” sort of mentality that prevents them from landing in one place lone enough to get any real traction.
The engineer has much to concern themselves with…scope of work, deadlines, and requests for proposals, it never seems to get easier!
They do have focus and it drives them to dismantle the entanglements that others can’t do…they are depended upon to clear away the wreckage of unfinished assignments and it is a thankless job.
I juxtapose the Liberal Arts major with the engineer for a reason, we are all unique in our complexity and perhaps we forget that. We interface with accounting and payroll and various other departments whether we want to or not and it would behoove us to put ourselves in their position sometimes. Why the burst of compassion? Simple, we need one another and we function better as a team when we don’t insert our fear of the unknown into it. The unknown can be something as basic as an officer of the company with the power to change our future with the company or the unknown can mean a new office mate that make themselves a little too comfortable right away and makes us uncomfortable with their back slapping and personal questions.
Life can be far more interesting when we don’t resist the inevitable because change is coming folks and it won’t slow down and wait until we are ready.
In today’s job market and workforce we are seeing a wholesale shift in things like cross training and job time sharing and it is making some of us a little hesitant to embrace change.So what do we do?
We accept that there is a changing of the guard, people no longer stay at their job for 20 years and we face facts that people move to where the jobs are. The new coworker will often be from a company that did things differently and cannot resist the urge to tell us how we are doing things the hard way. They may also be quite bitter about how changes affected them…our job..as one human being to another, is to be grateful for the job, the staff and the fact that the firm is employing people instead of cutting back!
I often hear people talk about how things used to be simple and you knew what you could count on and today’s world is a little too fast and a little too impersonal and how loyalty doesn’t count anymore.
Well, all I can say is that while some of that might be true, it doesn’t seem to be any different than trying to push the river…instead I try to be flexible, understanding of the ways of others and ultimately try to invest in the greater good. Quietly I instill a sense of gratitude for what I have and try to make things better instead of only liking what is good or easy.
