| ??? 03/16/06 16:48 Read: times |
#112326 - Technical Guru Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Richard Erlacher said:
What I find disturbing these days is that a young engineer comes into an organization at a junior level and takes part in an ongoing engineering effort. If he's found to be useful, then he's allowed to participate, else he's relegated to fetching coffee, meeting with salesmen, and other meaningless tasks. If he's been useful, he's assigned a more significant role on the next project. When that's completed, assuming he's still shown he's worth keeping, he's put at the head of a team on the next project. After that, he's no longer an engineer, but is promoted into a management role, where he'll never do another useful thing as long as he lives. This is all too often true but it does not have to be this way. We had a career route parallel to the management one that we called the 'Technical Guru'. Seniority and pay were the same as management at the same age/qualification/whatever but the duties were quite different and were primarily technically based. Alongside his growing technical skills, the technical guru was also expected to grow in areas such as interpersonal skills so they could communicate at the highest levels in industry and government, also speak in public and play a role in sales, marketing and recruitment. Ian |
