Become an engineering entrepreneur today

Almost on a daily basis, you read about Australian manufacturing (and even mining) businesses shutting down. After the hammering of the recent ‘Great Recession’, companies are rapidly reducing tangible assets - buildings, machines and, inevitably, people such as high-cost engineering staff. And we know that there is a massive amount of outsourcing going on - meaning jobs go elsewhere, often overseas. This is all happening today and will eventually impact on you in some form.

The days of expecting a job for 30 to 40 years, say, from one company are rapidly diminishing as competition intensifies. I clearly remember starting out in the diamond mining business as a junior engineer with thousands of other highly skilled engineering professionals working for this one company. It had been around for over a hundred years and we all believed it would be around for many more years. Today, it is a poor shadow of itself with only a tiny number of engineers and technicians. An unbelievable situation when one considers how dynamic and profitable it was only 20 years ago.

We thus need to approach the problem of employment from a different angle and create engineering jobs ourselves. And employ others. Engineering professionals have the innate technical prowess to make things. Add in creativity to the mix and an understanding of what the market wants and you could have a winning product or service within months. Admittedly, you may work long hours and be exposed to some stress along the way.

But the winners are individuals which we refer to as engineer-entrepreneurs and companies that come up with new products and services which the global community wants. And keep coming up with new products or improvements to existing products. Otherwise they also die.

We thus need the engineer-entrepreneur to conceptualise and design new products and services. A product doesn’t have to be something totally unique or new; a slight improvement on an existing product, service or process can also be a winner. This applies to you whether you are working for another company or for yourself. Seek out opportunities to innovate and create new products and services. In this way you can extend the life of your company and your career.

It should be noted that as an engineer-entrepreneur, there is a chasm between successfully operating a startup company and a small business. The much vaunted business schools tend to gloss over the differences and treat both as the same, but they are totally different. One key difference is that a startup company often has a brilliant product which has incredible possibilities, but no actual market (at present) - so the startup has the additional challenge of getting the product to market.

Engineering professionals also have to be ferociously self-sufficient, self-sustaining and lifelong learners responsible for staying in business. They also have to be prepared to learn from their customers in optimising their creations so that they are economically viable. Often we hear things from our customers that we don’t want to hear. Inevitably, engineer-entrepeneurs must be prepared to have a high threshold of tolerance to repeated failure and the ability to persist to success.

Above all - you have to believe in yourself.

As George Lois points out: Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

Steve Mackay, PhD CPEng, has worked mainly in the industrial automation and data communications fields for the past 30 years and is currently dean of engineering with worldwide engineering education business IDC Technologies (www.idc-online.com). He has also published over 30 engineering books, as both editor and co-author.