An engineer successfully transitioned from mechanical to controls not by asking for training, but by first learning the fundamentals independently. By showing initiative and baseline knowledge, he made it a low-risk decision for his manager to give him a chance on a real project.
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Don't commit to a rigid career plan. Instead, treat your career like a product. Run small-scale experiments or 'MVPs'—like a 20% project, a volunteer role, or a teaching gig—to test your interest and aptitude for new skills before making a full commitment, then iterate based on the results.
Pursuing a more fulfilling career doesn't require risking financial ruin. Instead of taking a blind leap, you can vet a new direction by "trying it on"—shadowing professionals, conducting informational interviews, and testing the work in small ways to understand its reality before making a full transition.
Individual contributors can dramatically increase their value by learning project management principles. Understanding how leaders think about scope, risk, and budget enables them to contribute more strategically, help their managers succeed, and accelerate their own careers.
Instead of "burning the ships," treat potential career changes as experiments. By starting a new venture as a side hustle without financial pressure, you can explore your curiosity, confirm it's a good fit, and build a "safety net" of confidence and proof before making a full leap.
To transition into management, engineers should prioritize gaining broad technical knowledge across disciplines. This breadth allows them to understand team-wide pain points, facilitate collaboration, and implement effective systems, rather than being the deepest expert in a single area.
To move from engineering to product, don't just ask for the role. Proactively demonstrate PM skills by systemizing learnings from customer interactions. Starting an internal 'customer insight newsletter' based on your debugging work proves your value and builds an undeniable case for the transition.
Intentionally accepting a lower level than you qualify for reduces immediate pressure to deliver massive project impact. This creates the space and freedom to explore, learn the systems, and build innovative side projects that establish a strong reputation from the ground up.
An engineer landed a career-defining project not by chance, but by design. He cultivated a reputation as a subject matter expert and high performer. When an unexpected staffing gap appeared (due to a senior's paternity leave), he was the obvious choice. This illustrates how to increase your "luck surface area" for opportunities.
To avoid becoming an "ivory tower" manager, engineering leaders should use side projects as a playground for new technologies. This practice ensures they understand the limitations of new tools like AI and can provide credible, concrete, hands-on guidance to their teams.
Unlike a corporate setting where failure has high stakes, solo projects allow you to take big swings and fail without career repercussions. The key is to treat these failures professionally by conducting post-mortems or root cause analyses to internalize learnings that are directly transferable.
