ABSTRACT
What's the best overall career advice I can give you? You need to think like a marketing person. Whether we are working as design engineers, group leaders, functional managers, project managers, or consultants, we are the product or service someone else is employing. Given the rise of outsourcing work to consultants and contractors and the increasingly acceptable mobility of engineers from company to company, we have to understand what our customers and "users" are looking for, make sure we can deliver, and make sure we even get a chance at the opportunity. Are you the most desirable person to hire? What attitudes and skills will make you the most "sellable" and ultimately successful throughout your career? How do you make sure you have access to all the available opportunities? This paper provides: • A comprehensive picture of the skills you need to develop as you move through
your career, with the very important context of why you need them (from the customer's viewpoint), and an integrated understanding of how presentation skills, technical expertise, meeting management skills, networking, business understanding, etc., can provide you with incredible career leverage;
• A method for coming up with a personal strategy for developing those skills; and • Ways to continually "market" yourself--communicating and using your
capabilities to maximize your opportunities, your success, and your overall career satisfaction.
