2018 Issue

51 (CMS) available to use (Wordpress is a common one). You can self-host your own website, or use a free service that gives you a subdomain for your site. With a blog you may have a few static pages, but most of the content is articles you post on projects or interesting things that you are involved with. Your entries need to highlight the areas of expertise or activities you want to emphasize. The content needs to show the same level of care that goes into your regular work. Another common way engineers put themselves on the Internet is with professional social networking sites, such as LinkedIn. For standard users, there is no fee. The sites are designed so that you can showcase your credentials and experience. Professional networking sites are often the first stop on a recruiter’s search for outside talent. Now that we have a platform for putting ourselves on the Internet, how do we make it real? Details and others who will vouch for our activities and abilities are key to making ourselves real on the Internet. Details help our words have meaning. When another person is willing to vouch for you, that makes your claims believable. When we put details out, be it a website, blog or entry on a professional networking site, we add body to who we are and what we can do. If you have images that show data from an experiment or prototypes of a design, that makes your efforts more believable. The more effort that goes into producing the data for what you publish, the more people will be impressed by it. Where possible, give credit to others who are involved. Doing so will reflect positively on those relationships. Those people will also be more like- ly to share what you wrote, which gives you more publicity. Next we can get an organization to vouch for us. The universities we graduate from do this when they give us a degree. Others we interact with assume a certain quality of engineer comes with that degree. If you are a Profession- al Engineer (P.E.) people assume that person is a certain quality of engineer as well. Do you hold an elevated mem- bership grade in IEEE or other engineering society? That means something. Do you have industry certifications from the IEEE or IPC? Again, those certifications come with the assumption that one must be a certain quality of engineer. Those certification, degrees or standings are your endorse- ment by those organizations. Getting others to vouch for our abilities is a different beast. This requires someone be sufficiently impressed with the job we did to put their name behind it. It also requires that person taking their time to write an endorsement of you. This is where professional social networking sites are the easy route. Someone can spend a few minutes to write a paragraph or two extolling your virtues. Again, quality counts. Is the person recommending you qualified to do so? Do they have details that make their recommendation have weight? Another concern with having others vouch for you is some- times the best person is prohibited from giving recom- mendations. Many companies are afraid of lawsuits and prohibit their employees from giving recommendations to coworkers or former employees. Always be on the lookout for someone who can publicly vouch for your work. An employee at a partner firm you worked with can vouch for your engineering prowess. If no one can speak up, what is an engineer to do? Often your extracurricular activities show abilities that are valued in the workplace. Are you involved in your local Boy or Girl Scout troop as a leader? If so, your fellow volunteers can recommend you for your ability to be organized, goal oriented and lead groups of people. Are you involved in a service organization like the Rotary Club or Engineers with- out Borders? Have them recommend you for your ability to get things done. IEEE is another great organization to be involved with. Not only does it give you a chance to show and grow your leadership abilities, but the people you work with are in po- sitions to recommend you to people they work with. The re- lationships that I have cultivated through my involvement in IEEE have helped me get jobs and been valuable resources when I’ve come to questions outside my area of expertise. I know of another IEEE member who got a job specifically because of the job he did helping run a conference. When one of the other conference organizers heard he was look- ing for a new job, he went to his boss and said, “You need to hire this guy. He knows how to get things done.” Don’t underestimate the importance of these non-technical abilities, or soft skills. When I hire someone, I want them to help me get more work done. I have passed over job candidates because I felt all my time would be spent giving them direction, which ends up being a net loss of produc- tivity for my team. I expect to spend some time teaching a newly hired engineer how my products work. I don’t expect or want to take the time to teach them how to be detail oriented and take pride in their work. Bringing it all back to the original question, looking real on the Internet is about details and quality. They may be details you put there yourself. They may be details others provide for you. When you present them make sure you they are presented in a way that shows you care about the work you do. Chad Kidder, P.E. currently works for IM- SAR, LLC designing radars and consults at Curious System Solutions, LLC as well. He can be reached at ckidder@ieee.org.