For all you engineers, it is critical to prepare for your retirement by developing the lifetime professional skills that will not only help your engineering career but will also be valuable in your postwork life. Here are a few of the skills I’m talking about and the kind of activities they will support:
Learn to speak effectively. Offer to be a guest speaker at engineering schools and IEEE sections. Talk about your career, your projects, anything that you’re good at and that might be of interest to others. If you’ve always wanted to teach, ask schools in your area if they’re looking for an adjunct instructor. Help out at career fairs.
Write more. Think of the interesting experiences in your career and life—the funny incidents, the challenging moments, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Write a couple of pages on each, give the piece a title, and assemble them into a collection of personal essays. Hey, you might even stitch them together into a memoir (like I’m doing). This can be valuable to your family and friends, and possibly to younger engineers still working through their careers, so they can learn from your experiences.
Get involved. There are so many opportunities. See what you can do in your professional societies, like the IEEE’s two speaker programs, S-PAC (Student Professional Awareness Conference) and, for older members, M-PAC (Member Professional Awareness Conference), where IEEE members can hear about nontechnical issues that affect their careers. Boundless community activities beckon—join the boards of nonprofit organizations or volunteer for any number of valuable programs at hospitals, libraries, and recreation programs. They need your help, and you will get tremendous personal satisfaction and, yes, ”giveback.”
Organize and lead activities. Think how valuable your leadership skills can be to other groups. Help the groups get organized, focus on tasks, deal with finances, identify critical-path items, delegate authority, keep to deadlines. Of course, you should be learning how to do all these things in your own working life.
Share your expertise. Keep up with your field, maintain your professional contacts, and offer to help organizations or individuals on a pro bono basis—or even get a fee plus expenses. Don’t be shy.
Network. Whether you read this as a verb (as in ”get out and meet people”) or as a noun (”the sum total of all your business friends and relatives”), keep meeting new people and discovering those who interest you and can be of value, both during your career and later, when it’s time to go on to something else.
Try something new or something that you always wanted to do. Go to any local adult school catalog and scroll through the pages, noting all the neat things you maybe never had time to study before. But maybe you think that everyone at some point (like that old dog) gets too old to learn new things. Well, I recall a true story about a woman in her 80s who was graduating from law school; when she was asked why she had sought to get her degree at such an advanced age, she replied, ”So I’ll be a lawyer for the rest of my life!”
The message here is to start preparing for the retirement that you want. If you’re stressed about something right now, ask yourself how important it will be in five or 10 years or when your career’s over. Hey, if no one has told you this yet: ”Life’s too short.” Or as John Mellencamp opines in the song ”Jack and Diane,” ”…life goes on, / Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone…” So go have a long and thrilling engineering career—and carry it right on into an even more satisfying retirement. Most of how your retirement plays out is up to you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Contributing Editor CARL SELINGER, an aviation and transportation engineering consultant in Bloomfield, N.J., has given his seminar on the soft, nontechnical skills, ”Stuff You Don’t Learn in Engineering School,” throughout the United States and Canada. His book of the same title has been published by Wiley/IEEE Press. For more information, go to http://www.carlselinger.com/seminars.html.
