When I look back at my career and ask myself what information about the real world would have been most helpful had someone shared it with me while I was still in school, I always come back to this notion of the engipreneurial mindset. Readers of this blog know by now that an engipreneur is an engineer who runs their career as they would their own business. Engipreneurs are creative thinkers who seek to bring innovation and value to everything they do. No matter what job they have, the engipreneur owns it. They are technically adept, yet always mindful of the principles of good business.

If you’re a college student, becoming an engipreneur will provide the edge you need to identify and land the perfect job. Here is how you do it.

Research

1. Identify your competition. In the current market, this consists not only of other students in the same position as yourself, but it also includes out-of-work engineers with years of experience who are willing to take lower salaries in order to pay the rent. You can add to that the highly educated, and extremely cheap, foreign workforce in places like the Philippines that can operate remotely as contract labor. Intimidating? No way! Take a long last look at your competition because you’re about to make them irrelevant.

2. Identify your target market. Public or private? Structural, geotechnical, or transportation? Decisions, decisions. Before you choose, open a phone book (if you can still find one around) and look under ‘Engineers – Civil.’ What do you see? Recession or not, land development and public works (public streets and utilities) still employ a huge segment of civil engineers. This is a numbers game to some extent. If you want to increase your odds of success by appealing to a larger target audience, don’t limit your focus to the elite segments of our profession. Geography is also important. Do you think you’re going to get more job offers in Tulare County (population 500,000) or Los Angeles County (population 10 million)?

3. Identify the pain points of your target market. Pain points are problems for potential clients… uh, I mean, potential employers. Pain points represent business opportunities for the astute engipreneur. What are the problems that your target market is facing that they would give just about anything to resolve? Landing projects and cutting expenses are a couple of obvious ones. Do your research. Ask around. Don’t shortcut this step – It’s critical.

Development

4. Create a unique service offering. Look at the issues that you identified in the previous step. How are you going to solve these problems in a way that no one else can? What are you willing to invest in order to set yourself apart from the competition? Be creative and move away from expected norms. Yes, this step is as hard as it sounds.

5. Package it in an irresistible way. Just like a box of holiday candy, you need to draw your customer in. Put a big red bow on it to get their attention. Put a picture on the box to give them a look at what’s inside. Let them smell it so they have no choice but to reach for their wallet. Actually, I’m not sure how that last one applies, but you get the idea. Develop a prototype. Offer a guarantee. What if you gave it away initially? Put yourself in their shoes and figure out what it would take to make your services irresistible.

6. Practice selling it. Spend a lot of time creating a well-written, thoughtful script that meticulously communicates your sales message. Then throw it away. You need to go through the exercise of understanding your service and why people need it, but when it comes to presenting that message, you don’t want to sound rehearsed. You need to know your pitch so well that it sounds completely natural when you present it to people. Be genuine. Be passionate. Then practice on everyone, including strangers.

Execution

7. Make connections. You will probably have already made lots of great contacts during the research phase. From now through the rest of your career, you need to constantly build and maintain your contact database. Get out there and meet people. Attend events that your target market is attending. Use the social media outlets: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs. Offer to take a decision maker to lunch. So few of your competitors are doing this consistently that you will naturally stand out from the crowd.

8. Get the word out. You can be the best engineer in the world, but you’re still going to be unemployed if no one knows that you’re available for hire. It’s time to start marketing. Use your contact database to launch an email campaign that highlights your unique service offering. Host an educational seminar and invite your target audience. Start a blog. Seek referrals and use them to promote your personal brand.

9. Over deliver. When all of your hard work finally pays off and you have landed your dream job, it’s time to deliver on your promises. Do it with gusto and give them more than they expect. Remember the people who helped you get there.  And most important, don’t stop being an engipreneur.

There you go. That’s not so hard, is it? Yeah, right. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. In the next blog entry, we will look at an example of how it’s done.

As presented to members of the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo on October 13, 2010.

A.J. Whitaker, PE, PLS
aj@engipreneur.com
More blogs on www.engipreneur.com