My dad is an environmental engineer, and he told me when I was first starting out in engineering, to find a niche or engineering specialty where I can become an expert at a specific thing. He told me to find a specialty where I was the go-to guy and it could greatly help me in my career. It wasn’t until my current job that I realized how right he was.
Finding an engineering specialty where you are the expert for information on a topic makes you incredibly valuable to your organization as a whole. It’s like a small career shortcut you can take. There are always people at every company that are essential to the ongoing operation of a specific thing. This especially applies when you are just starting out as an engineer or when you are starting a new position at a company. Many times the specialty can fall right into your lap, you just need to be able to identify it when it does.
A good example of this happened to me fairly recently, when I began work on aengineering change we needed to implement with our heat treatment process. Parts were below specification on the drawing and we needed to decide if this would affect function or not. After investigating, I found out a wealth of information on how heat treatment affects the load capacity of gears (fascinating stuff). The more I found out, the more I dug deeper into it. A while later, the same issue came up with a different set of parts in production that was close to shutting us down. Using the information I learned, I was able to determine that these parts were not at risk and we were able to keep the plant running. I am now the go-to guy to come to when we are facing heat treatment effects on parts, and much less fire-able.
When looking for where your niche is in the company, look for the following criteria:
● Specific problems that come up time and time again, where no one really steps up and handles.
● Roles that you see is missing in your group that could add value
● Jobs or topics are you personally interested in or seem to be really easy for you to understand.
● Areas just outside of your job description, that could help others in your group do their job more efficiently.
● Pareto Issues – The 20% of the topics that cause 80% of the problems.
Once you find your topic that you want to pursue, its time for you to become an expert at it. You can go about it a few different ways. The easiest path is to involve your manager in your new found expertise and see if he will support your quest for knowledge. Usually managers find this commendable and will help you to merge it into your workload. A good time to bring up your desired engineering specialty is during a review. Here you usually have an opportunity to give feedback to management about what goals you have for the next year. Adding your niche as a goal is a great way to get support down the road and make sure that you will have separate time to focus on becoming the expert.
Now, sometimes your boss will not be too keen on you working on a topic outside of your core competencies. If you detect some resistance when you bring it up you may want to reconsider if the goal is critical to the advancement of you and the company. If the answer is still yes, then you should still pursue all the knowledge you can for the topic. If it is truly an important issue, the topic is bound to come up again. When it does, you will have the opportunity to show your manager that it is a critical role to fill, and you are the one with the knowledge to do it.
Keep your ear to the ground and that one awesome topic will eventually reveal itself. Then, it is up to you to become an expert in it. If you become good enough at it and can apply it well you will really be advancing your career.
Pareto Efficiency for Engineers
The 80/20 Rule
I am a huge fan of the Pareto Principal or “80/20 rule” which states that 20% of the effort or time you put forth will yield 80% of your results. This principal came from an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who determined that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. This pattern is seen everywhere. 20% of the population owns 80% of the money. 20% of the people at work cause you 80% of your problems. If you can identify and focus on that 20% from the beginning, you will be able to grow much quicker in your role.
Ok Great. How can I use it?
A good example of the principal put to use is when I handle design deviations that result from our manufacturing process. When there is a slight issue with a part dimension or measurement, production is required to write a deviation to be able to use the parts. It is my job to determine if these issues will affect the function of the part or if it could lead to any issue with the lifetime of the vehicle like it exploding or something. If I focused intensely on knowing how to answer every deviation that came to my desk, I would be focusing on probably 100 parts with 100 dimensions on each that could affect function. However, there are only 5-10 deviations I can think of on the top of my head that I deal with almost every day. These represent more than 80% of the deviations I deal with on a weekly basis. I make sure that I am an expert at answering those types of problems, or I go out and try to fix the root cause and eliminate the problem altogether. If I can solve even one of these, I may have eliminated most of the time I spend weekly on deviations. For all the other less common deviations, I absolutely need to know how to answer -but why would I study the problem and give them the same weight I do for the ones that come up all the time?
Keep a look out for that 20%
Keep Pareto efficiency in mind when you are working in any engineering field because I can promise you, you will see specific issues, or tasks that come up time and time again. Identifying and focusing on these few issues, will greatly benefit you in your career. You will be able to get much more done in a smaller amount of time, because as you get better at the common issues, you will have more time to work on and improve those really difficult problems that come up every now and then.
So for the next week, identify the specific work or tasks that take up 80% of your time, and break it down into the few items that cause it. What are those few skills you can learn and improve on that will help solve most of the issues you face day to day? To get you started here are some things to think about for the different departments in automotive engineering.
Pareto Efficiency for a Design/ Development Role:
● What are the 20% of the design tools that you use to develop your parts? Which ones are more effective for getting the work done quickly and accurately?
● What 20% of your design responsibilities cause you 80% of the problems later on?
● What are the few resources you can refer to that can help you with most of your workload?
● Which few tolerances or dimensions on your parts causes production the most amount of trouble?
● Which few tests can almost always identify problems in the parts before they get to production?
Pareto Efficiency for the Manufacturing Role:
● Which few processes cause you the majority of your problems? (I’m sure you can name shout these out without hesitation!)
● Which 20% of parts can you work on with design to improve 80% of the issues you are having?
● Who are the few people outside your department that you can refer to for most of the issues you have?
● Where are the few issues that cause the majority of your downtime?
Pareto Efficiency for the Quality Role
● What are the few issues that are always coming up that require a long term solution to solve?
● What few parts in the DFMEA or PFMEA do you see the most potential risk for.
● Which few suppliers cause the majority of the problems at your facility (Focus on them or try to replace them with better suppliers.)
● What several part tolerances are always out of spec and need to be better controlled or redesigned?
● What few measurements are always being requested and is there a way to measure them more efficiently and accurately?
● What are the 20% of the customer complaints that recur & really piss them off the most?
These are just examples, but if you do identify your few problems areas and focus on solving those issues first, it will be a huge benefit to your department and your company as a whole. You can greatly advance your career by looking for those few areas that contribute 80% of the pain and problems in your company. Keep in mind, although the Pareto Principal is best used to help you focus your efforts more efficiently, you shouldn’t completely ignore the issues that only come up once in a while. However, applying Pareto Efficiency in your work will help you to learn and grow in your role much faster. This will lead to massive effectiveness in handling whatever workload you are given.
Best of luck and keep your eyes open for how you can apply Pareto Efficiency to make a huge impact on your productivity.
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