English is the most spoken language in the world, with the number of speakers (native and non-native) totaling more than 1.4 billion in 2022. Over the years, English has become—for all intents and purposes—the language of science. International conferences are held in English, and the world’s top scientific journals are in English. In fact, 95% of all articles published in scientific journals in 2020 were written in English.
Among many professionals, scientists, technologists, and business experts who belong to various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, English is how they communicate with a global audience. Without fluency in English, engineering students and professionals may find it difficult to understand the concepts being conveyed by international colleagues, struggle to publish as much as they would like, and even lag behind in career advancement.
Build on What You Know
Careful reading and writing are key skills for fields beyond the humanities. Communication skills play a significant role in STEM-based professions. According to John Kanjirakkat, a teacher of humanities in STEM institutions, “One cannot claim a meaningful understanding of a concept if they cannot write about it with clarity.” Every professional should be able to write what makes their work different or unique, especially in academic or trade journals.
Although several free and paid online tools are available, researchers should not rely on them too heavily. Developing your own writing abilities will be better in the long run. “If you are leaning very hard on these tools to choose the right words and the right grammar for you…then your work could be full of errors [of which] you aren’t even aware,” warns Tracy Volz, director of the engineering communications program at Rice University.
When reviewers criticize the writing in a manuscript, it is often because the writing is poorly organized. “That’s a problem that all writers can face whether English is their primary language or not,” according to Anna Clemens, an academic-writing coach based in Prague. Clemens encourages students to “try to articulate the key idea of their paper in a few short, well-worked-out English sentences. They can then reuse and build on that language as they write.” Your best bet, however, Clemens notes, is to find a community to help.
Get Support from the IEEE Community
The IEEE English for Technical Professionals course program is designed to provide speakers with a basic knowledge of English better understand the techniques, and vocabulary essential to the technical and engineering workplace.
The program includes:
- 18 hours of online instruction with lessons set in working engineering contexts
- Modules on reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills
- Short assessments and exercises throughout the program to help improve skills
- Final quiz/test at the end of each level
- Certificates are issued at the end of each lesson, as well as at the end of the full program
The skills and techniques covered in this course program benefits not only current working engineers and technical professionals, but also new graduates entering technical industries, university students studying engineering and other technical concepts, as well as Ph.D. students, research scholars, and individuals who want to improve their technical writing.
Connect with an IEEE Content Specialist today to learn more about how to offer this program within your organization.
Interested in the program for yourself? Visit the IEEE Learning Network.
Resources
Hernández Bonilla, Juan Miguel. (30 Jul 2021). How to end the hegemony of English in scientific research. El País.
Kanjirakkat, Jobin. (10 August 2022). Why Teach the Humanities in STEM Institutions. LiveWire.
Katsnelson, Alla. (29 August 2022). Poor English skills? New AIs help researchers to write better. Nature.
Kaufman, Anna. (23 August 2022). What is the most spoken language in the world 2022? Top 10 spoken languages, globally. USA Today.
Have you been stuck in the same technical profession for years? Whether you are looking for a job with more opportunities or desire to move into a completely new field, making the right moves and staying focused on your goals will be essential to landing your next gig. Here are seven steps you can take to get there.
Start by asking yourself what you want in your next career:
What do you like and dislike about your current role? Do you prefer to work in teams or independently? What are the skills and tasks you find most enjoyable? Create a list of these preferences to use as a reference while you look to make your career switch.
Consider your personal values:
Perhaps you like your job, but the organization you work for conflicts with your values. Make a list of organizations whose values align with your own. You can typically find this information in a company’s mission statement. Once you’ve determined which organization’s values are in sync with yours, take a look at their job openings and see what opportunities are available that may interest you.
Check out which industries are growing the most:
This research will give you valuable insight into what fields are providing the best opportunities. You can often find this information through government research— such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections— or by researching career websites, which often contain salary data.
Rebrand yourself as a professional:
Once you know the type of job you want and the kinds of organizations you wish to find employment, rebrand yourself in a way that aligns with your desired position. Be sure to revise your online career profile, business cards, resume, and social media profiles in a way that sends a message to potential employers that you are a good match for them. Your cover letters should also reflect this personal branding.
Get more experience in your dream job:
A big obstacle people often face when trying to switch careers is not having enough experience in their desired field. To solve this problem, consider picking up related freelance and/or volunteer work. Not only is it a great addition to your resume, it will show prospective employers that you are serious about making a change. As another benefit, you may also increase your network by creating connections in the field.
However, if the skills are sophisticated and require training outside freelance and volunteer work, consider obtaining a certification or even going back to school.
Have a plan:
Your next step is to set goals and to be proactive in achieving them. Commit a certain amount of time each day to network, search jobs, and submit your resume. It’s also important to set a mix of both small and large goals. For example, you can make it a goal to submit two resumes a day or submit five per week. You could plan to attend at least one networking event each month or work towards building a more robust LinkedIn profile. Whatever you decide for your plan, be consistent.
Grow your professional network:
To land a job outside your current field, you need to grow your professional connections to include people in that industry. A few ways to do this include using your alumni network, attending local professional events, volunteering, and reaching out to professionals on social media who work in that field. See if they are willing to speak to you and offer you advice.
Switching careers is not easy for everyone. However, knowing what you want, having goals, and staying consistent can help you be much more successful in landing your next job.
Build Your Knowledge Through Continuing Education
Jumpstart your career change through continuing education and professional development! Making a point to develop new skills can help show potential employees that you’re dedicated to improving within your current or future field of expertise.
Since its launch in 2019, the IEEE Learning Network (ILN) has provided continuing education to technical professionals from around the world. With hundreds of courses available across IEEE, ILN offers the latest in continuing education for engineers and technology professionals who want to advance professionally, refresh their skills, or stay up-to-date with the latest trends.
Explore the courses and start learning today on iln.ieee.org!
Resources
Indeed Editorial Team. (9 November 2021). How To Switch Careers: A Step-By-Step Guide. Indeed.com.
Adamczyk, Alicia. (22 September 2022). If you want to change careers, start by finding your ‘why’. CNBC.
Liu, Joseph. (2 April 2019). How To Change Careers, According To 50 People Who Made A Pivot. Forbes.
Managers promoted for their technical knowledge sometimes lack the soft skills vital for them to be effective leaders who inspire and foster commitment among their teams. With the right training, these managers can grow to become strong, well rounded leaders.
How Can You Become A Better Leader?
The difference between an effective leader and one who simply holds a management title is that an effective leader is self-reflective and proactively embraces opportunities for growth. According to executive coach Monique Valcour, there are three simple steps you can take to become a better leader.
1) Determine a new leadership skill you want to achieve:
Is there a particular problem you need to solve? Before looking for solutions, figure out how you can improve your performance as a leader to tackle the problem. This will require you to focus on yourself instead of what’s worrying you. To be an effective leader, you need to understand that you cannot “fix” people the same way you would fix a technical issue, and you need to learn to recognize how your own behavior and thinking affects those around you. When things go wrong, do you have a tendency to overreact or criticize others? If so, you could be contributing to the problem in ways you don’t realize. To avoid this, identify what is important to you about achieving your goals and why you want to achieve them. This can help motivate you to learn and grow self-reflectively as a leader.
2) Ask for feedback to improve your understanding of the problem, just as you would if you were attempting to solve a technical issue:
A great way to expand your understanding of a problem is to ask others for their feedback and perspectives. For instance, if you feel as though an employee is acting out or struggling, talk to them about the situation before jumping to conclusions. Understand that criticizing a team member or giving them a poor performance evaluation without understanding the situation from their perspective can be demoralizing and may cause them to mistrust you.
3) Once you’ve developed insight into the situation and how your own behavior may have played a role, take steps to effective change:
Just as leaders give feedback to their employees, they should also seek feedback from their teams about how they can improve their own leadership moving forward (what executive coach Marshall Goldsmith dubs “feedforward”). This process can help build communication, accountability, and trust between yourself and your team.
How Can Organizations Improve Leadership?
Organizations that do not take responsibility for ineffective leadership in their ranks often suffer from low employee morale and performance. Training programs can help new managers understand what actually represents good leadership, as well as what they need to do to become effective leaders. By creating opportunities for growth, organizations can create a culture of effective leadership that benefits everyone.
Develop Effective Leaders Within Your Organization
IEEE has partnered with Rutgers Business School to offer the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers. Ranked as one of the three best Mini-MBAs by Forbes, the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers helps corporate employees bridge the gap between business and engineering as they prepare for growth into leadership roles. The program operates entirely online and is designed specifically for groups of ten or more within an organization. It features topics, such as business strategy, managing product development, finance, negotiation, managing human capital, intellectual property strategy, and transformational agility.
Participants learn how to make organizational decisions with both technical and operational considerations. After developing an understanding of how different functional groups interact to achieve overall goals, they learn to apply their newly developed business skills to better align their technical capabilities with business strategy.
The program offers the option of a customized capstone project, completely aligned to the needs of your organization. As part of the project, participants receive feedback from program professors who have worked as engineering leaders themselves.
To learn more about the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers for your organization, contact an IEEE Account Manager today.
Resources
Valcour, Monique. (24 May 2021). Transform Your Technical Expertise into Leadership. Harvard Business Review.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations around the world to digitize their workforces. As the pandemic continues and remote work becomes the new norm for many organizations, leaders who fail to effectively transition into the digital realm may struggle. However, there are steps they can take to adopt the increasingly digital workspace and become digitally savvy leaders.
Employees Want Digitally Savvy Leaders
According to a newly released report from MIT Sloan Management Review, 93% of employees across regions and industries think digital savviness is necessary to succeed. Having a sense of purpose is also important. 72% of workers surveyed stated that they “strongly agree that it is very important to them to work for an organization with a purpose they believe in,” according to the Leadership’s Digital Transformation report. Additionally, 88% of workers surveyed reported that having leaders who are digitally savvy is critical to their company’s ability to achieve that purpose.
However, less than half of those surveyed said their organizations have created project teams that are intentionally diverse when it comes to digital savviness. Furthermore, only 31% thought their companies were assessing the digital skills of their managers. Less than 20% thought their companies were ensuring digital know-how among their high ranking managers.
Focus on Purpose
Your workers can often sense if you aren’t passionate about the organization and its purpose. If you want them to feel more confident in your leadership, you need to regularly communicate the organization’s strategic purposes to your team. It can help to specify how the organization’s purposes align with their productivity and goals.
“Having a compelling mission statement isn’t enough,” the report states. “Serious leaders must appear as genuinely passionate about enterprise purpose as they are about strategy, agility, and customer centricity. The key is to authentically embed and enable purpose as part of the organization’s digital transformation trajectory. Purpose thus has an operational as well as an aspirational rationale that invites new leadership accountability.”
Develop “Digital Situational Awareness”
Since the pandemic began, remote work has blurred the traditional boundaries between work and home. Even when the work day is over, many workers still find themselves fielding emails. Often, they have to choose between work and family obligations.
Just 28% of workers surveyed said their company had policies on how and when to contact them beyond work hours. Furthermore, only 24% said their company stuck to these policies if they had them.
For many, gone are the days when workers could simply knock on their manager’s door. Remote employees need clarity around when and how to reach out to their bosses. This means leaders need to establish boundaries and make an effort to respect these guidelines.
“The key to being measurably more effective is becoming measurably more affective,” the report states. “Leaders who want to succeed have no choice but to digitally transform themselves. Leaders who are unwilling or unable to proactively use data and analytics to understand how their leadership is experienced will underperform.”
Take Advantage of “Mutual Mentoring”
One way leaders can digitally transform themselves is through “mutual” or “reverse” mentoring, in which younger employees mentor those who are older. Although 71% of survey respondents thought younger workers were more successful at obtaining value from digital tools at their organizations, just 19% said their organizations engaged in this kind of mentorship.
The pandemic will eventually end, but remote work is here to stay for many people. If leaders want to be successful, they need to adjust to a new way of managing employees, and for many, digital transformation will be key to their success.
Create Leaders in Your Organization
IEEE has partnered with Rutgers Business School to offer the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers. Designed specifically for groups of ten or more within an organization, this program operates entirely online. It features topics including business strategy, managing product development, finance, negotiation, managing human capital, intellectual property strategy, and transformational agility.
Participants will learn how to make organizational decisions with both technical and operational considerations. After developing an understanding of how different functional groups interact to achieve overall goals, they will learn to apply their newly developed business skills to better align their technical capabilities with business strategy.
The program offers the option of a customized capstone project, completely aligned to the needs of your organization. As part of the project, you’ll receive feedback from program professors who have worked as engineering leaders themselves.
To learn more about the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers for your organization, contact an IEEE Account Manager today.
Resources
(26 January 2021). Leadership’s Digital Transformation: Leading Purposely in an Era of Context Collapse. MIT Sloan Management Review.