At Issue

To get a job, let people know you’re an expert and why you should be picked.

by Masha V. Petrova, founder/CEO, MVP Modeling Solutions 

If your job search is in a rut and you are seriously contemplating putting aside your pride and a master’s degree in engineering to deliver pizzas, first read this article and follow the recommended steps.

Nowadays, simply being a chemist, a programmer, an engineer, etc with a lot of publications and hard-core technical degrees is not going to get you a job. To get a job in this economy, you need to let people know that you are an expert, what you are an expert in, and why anyone should hire you over thousands of other very smart PhDs with 15-20 years of experience.

Not fair. I know. Back in college, we did not stay up until the wee hours of the night drawing Free Body Diagrams while our roommates drank themselves into oblivion at frat parities, only to be humiliated by a fruitless job search years later. But life goes on, and if you want to stay in the game, you can use Google to make yourself into a mini technical celebrity.

Aaahhhh…Google…Born as an intriguing idea in the heads of two engineering undergrads in Northern Cali, Google has grown into a corporate goliath. The company with an ambitious goal to “organize the world’s information,” has brought us so much more than just a search engine without a distractingly clustered homepage.

You can start building your on-line reputation as an expert (or a mini technical celebrity) with the help of some great Google tools: Blogger, Reader, Knol, Analytics and Youtube. In true Google spirit, all of these tools are all free and very simple to use. Here is how:

Start a Blog (using Blogger, Google Reader and Blog Search)

In my Successful Unemployment Toolkit (http://successfulunemploymenttoolkit.com/ ) I emphasize how crucial it is to be able to express your thoughts on paper. How do you demonstrate your writing skills to your potential employers? You need to publish, and I am not just talking about publishing technical papers in peer-reviewed journals.   

First, start a professional (emphasis on professional) blog. This also happens to be a great avenue for networking and building relationships in your field. If you commit to writing for your blog every week, you will greatly improve your writing skills and because people can leave comments on your blog, you connect with others in your area of expertise.

Remember that your blog is a part of the World Wide Web and if you make it public – it will be visible to other people, including potential employers. A blog will allow you to demonstrate to the world that you are the expert in this field. It will help build your credibility and help you stand out from the crowd of other experts.

What can you write about? Here are some suggestions:

• Tell interesting stories that you have experienced in the past about a problem that you had to solve or a unique solution you found.
• Describe funny situations you witnessed when working with pushy sales people or demanding customers.
• Elaborate on some technical theories you might have developed on your own.
• If you figured out a way to make a standard R&D process more effective, describe it in a blog post.

Your main goals are to let people know what you think, make your posts interesting (so others would actually read them), and to demonstrate your expert knowledge and problem solving ability in your line of work.

To see some blog examples, make use of another Google tool: http://blogsearch.google.com/. Search “engineering”, “physics”, “C++” or other topics related to your line of work. Find blogs that you like and add their RSS feeds to your Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader/.  Study the various blog posts for a week or so, and then signup with www.blogspot.com, and start building your credibility on the web with the help of a blog.

Solidify your credibility as an expert (using Google Knol and Analytics)

One of my favorite features of Google is that a single loggin and password will get you access to all of the many Google tools. My most recent discovery is something that you should also add to your arsenal of job searching tools. That tool is Knol http://knol.google.com. Currently in beta testing, Knol allows users to share their knowledge with others, which is precisely what you are striving to do if you are serious about landing a job in the next two years.

Yes, this will require you to write more. Getting your writing into the hands of others in your professional field will do wonders for your job search. Your ultimate goal is for companies to call you, before you even apply for a job! Since I started my two blogs, I had several offers for job interviews and I am not even looking for work. The trick is to keep at it. Keep writing and expressing your professional opinion.

Keep track of whether or not anyone is interested in what you have to say. This will be obvious by how many comments you are getting on your blogs and by how many visits you get to your Blogger and Knol posts. You can track your visits with Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/, which is essential to building your credibility on the web. Be sure to link Analytics to your Blogger and Knol posts and keep checking who is visiting your sites. If after a few months of consistent witting, no one is reading – it’s very possible that your communication skills have been preventing you from getting a job.

Let the world (and potential employers) get to know you (using Youtube)

In October, 2006, Google acquired Youtube. Today, Youtube is considered to be a 2^nd largest search engine (next to Google) in the USA. For you that means having an instant audience ready to hear what you have to say.

If you can present yourself as an expert, in an entertaining way, you will be viewed and heard by hiring managers, employed technical experts who can recommend you to their hiring managers, project managers, professional association members, and others with potential to help you obtain that much needed paycheck.

To get started, prepare a 5-10 minute talk about your professional area of expertise (see above blog topics). Get a web camera (you can get one for under $50 in Best Buy or Amazon) and record your talk (make sure the setting is professional – do not record in your daughter’s room, surrounded by Barbies’ for example). Upload your video on Youtube or embed it into your blog, and you are well on your way to demonstrating to potential employers that you are not only an expert, but a good communicator.

Do not rely on the economy to turn around and rescue you from unemployment hell. Take matters into your own hands and call on Google and the forces that made it into a multi-billion dollar company and start building yourself into the kind of employee that companies fight over to hire.

Masha V. Petrova holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering is a founder and CEO of MVP Modeling Solutions. Her weekly blog on a variety of engineering topics, can be found on http://mvpmodelingsolutions.com/mvpblog/ Her blog on Increasing Your Professional Value can be found on http://successfulunemploymenttoolkit.com/blog/.

Stressed if you do, stressed if you don’t.

by Anna Wells, Editor, IMPO

Although it’s an instance that is becoming more and more rare as we grow older and our responsibilities increase, my friends and I like to get together on the occasional weekend night and spend hours at a long, lavish dinner out. We give ourselves time for wine and coffee and dessert, and do our best to catch up.

Inevitably, we discuss our careers—it can’t be avoided. When you want to know “what’s new,” it at least somewhat implies that “what” we spend 50 hours a week doing. Invariably, we devolve into heavy sighs over project deadlines and expectations asked of us and others… the stress of the day to day.

I stumbled across an interesting “slide show” on CNN.com the other day—one of those bite-sized e-news mediums for us busy, stressed out people. This was a list of the top “high stress” jobs relative to pay, with a link to another group of slides—those with the lowest stress level. The way these levels were determined was through feedback—X percent of folks with said career found their jobs stressful.

The interesting (read: scary) part of these statistics were the inflations. While I didn’t expect any no-stress jobs, the low end of the low stress jobs started at a 40 percent stress rate. Though it’s hardly enviable, it made me wonder: is it accurate?

I sometimes wonder if stress has become too closely aligned with some sort of manic productivity that we’ve all lumped in our pie-in-the-sky ideals of success.

The thing I love about manufacturing is that lean has taken this concept and overturned it. It takes the unnecessary motion out of the equation—i.e. removing the concept of work for work’s sake.

That said: The concept doesn’t remove the stress, does it…? At the end of the day, I spend 45 minutes on a treadmill trying to place a pleasant gap of steady breathing between my brain and my desk. Don’t get me wrong: I love my job, but I’m certainly not immune to days where I bang my head against the wall.

But it certainly raises the question: Is my job stressful for me simply because I care? And to take that one step further, does the stress tell me—somewhere deep in the cavities of an over-active brain—that I am doing a good job? If the reverse were true, and I didn’t feel overwhelmed and exhausted on occasion, I think I’d stress over a fear that I’m not adequately doing my job.

So maybe you’re stressed if you do, and stressed if you don’t.

It took me a few years in the workforce before I realized that the number of hours I was putting in was only tenuously tied to the actual level of the work I was putting out. Eventually I got better at my job, and was able to accomplish the same tasks in a shorter period of time. But throughout that process, new tasks were acquired. It goes this way consistently, and I have to admit—I like the struggle. But what I need to constantly remind myself of is that stress is my own response, and therefore, my own responsibility.

The important part is not blowing it out of proportion, and creating anxiety for its own sake. When I think of a high stress job, I think of workplaces like emergency rooms and oil rigs. Nowhere in this CNN slide show was a picture of my own desk, lined pleasantly with photographs and smelling of lemon cleaner. Gee… why not?

I think my new goal should not be to de-stress my life, but to redefine what stress actually is. If it’s doing a good and thorough job and occasionally working through puzzles and objectives at night when my brain is still running, then I ought to consider myself lucky.

Do we overuse the concept of stress? Email your thoughts to anna.wells@advantagemedia.com.

$15 bucks a pop? No thanks, I’m stocking tampons.

By David Mantey, Editor, PD&D

Professionally, I’ve always considered myself a fairly progressive and forward-looking individual.

Not the smoke and mirrors forward-looking that you can find at the bottom of nine out of 10 “news stories” that cross the wires, but the type that looks at something new and either sees value or, I see it as a potentially never-ending crevasse into which we will always be able to dive, but no amount of money will ever cushion the fall.

I imagine a real life enactment of Scrooge McDuck (Uncle Scrooge, if you will) diving into the pile of gold. But when we jump into the gold-filled sink hole, we splatter on the coins or, in the event that they have yet to settle firmly into place, we fly through them into the beyond (it just seemed easier on the imagination than alluding to additional splatter imagery).

You want spatter, read the Times – enough for semi-political conversation and more violence than anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. If I think the fashionably new toy could add value, I follow up with ‘let’s give it a shot’ or ‘Yes, but how?’ (And sometimes, Why?)

Twitter? Let’s try it.

Facebook? Why not (a work in progress).

LinkedIn? Individually, yes.

Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Slashdot? Yes, yes, yes. Subscribe, post, vote, share, blog. Jump on the bandwagon, or depending on the vehicle, let it pass (MySpace). PD&D is not a band with a playlist, so I don’t see a need for another MySpace deluge. What would be on the Engineer Rock playlist other than the Matrix soundtrack?

I’d ask when enough is enough, but if you or I haven’t realized that the answer is ‘never’ well, let’s just say that the pasture won’t be a lonely place.

In a matter of time, I’ll be wandering out there with many of you after I simply run out of time to post, or my hands close and refuse to ever open again after years of repeated key-pounding Carpal Tunnel-inducing abuse. I helped my brother paint a single room this weekend and my hand remained locked as though I was clutching the Holy Grail for the following hour. Since when did I need a cool down after the remedial task?

After 350 words of head-scratching babble, you may be asking yourself what set me off on a rant spiraling into the nonsensical. It was just that, junk content. I just read an article on Wired.com (via Folio) regarding a content generation company that is flooding the internet with content that is in demand.

An algorithm mines keywords to see what people are searching, and another refines it into something that won’t land on the fifth Google page. I believe the article quoted one of the most valuable phrases as “How to Donate a Car in Dallas.” Really gripping stuff.

However, instead of using this info to develop something of more use than a top 10 or a quick one minute how-to video, Demand Media pays an army of freelance videographers and writers to shoot or write the piece as fast as possible and submit it for a nominal fee - $15 for an article, $20 for a video. And you thought the internet lacked credibility before?

That’s right, even the written word can be manufactured. Sure, it’s a step above the poem generators some of my peers attempted to use in college (tell me more about the chrome spider mosque), but as we have seen in new product development, volume is not the answer. Just because the customer finds you first, doesn’t mean you’re giving them what they need. If I’m in the online market for a DVD player, I’m not sure that “Free DVD Player Software: audio, video, DVD player for free” is going to have what I am looking for. 

I find it similar to the dollar and how one of our new national pastimes is printing money. When I was a kid and the family was strapped, I would ask, “Well Ma, why don’t we just print more money?”

She replied, “Well, then it wouldn’t have any value, would it?”

I didn’t understand and went to my doodle pad with a crumpled dollar to begin my own Crayola-sponsored illegal printing press. I soon understood once it was legal for me to stock toothpaste and deodorant for minimum wage.

I wasn’t in a sweatshop at 14, but try to keep your middle school cool when your friends visit you while you’re stocking the feminine hygiene section. Slick the hair back as far as it can go, there is no such thing as James Dean cool when you smell like baby powder.

Look Ma, my box of 50 wax colors and I apparently could have had a role in the past two administrations. No money? Print it. 

And $15 an article? I’ll pass, I can make that stocking tampons for two hours at the local grocer, and somehow I’ll actually feel as though I’m doing the world a service — at least making the community a better place.

Volume may seem to be a present solution, but if oversaturated new product development – and the growing junk piles of techno garbage – have taught us anything, it is that volume is not the long term answer.

Do you agree? Or am I nuts? Either way, I’ll take a pill and set down the coffee while I await your response. As always, the inbox punching bag can be found by clicking david.mantey@advantagemedia.com. Also jab by commenting below. If only I had one more sport-related cliché, that would really knock it out of the park. Yeah, I did.

Long before Al Gore invented Power Point presentations or President Obama campaigned on a pledge to overhaul our national grid

by Jeff Reinke, Editorial Director, PD&D

It’s not a new problem, per se. The need to improve energy usage trends and implement more efficient approaches has been a relevant topic long before Al Gore invented Power Point presentations or President Obama campaigned on a pledge to overhaul our national grid.

What is new is the debate surrounding the slew of potential solutions. What priority should they be given? What approach is deserving of government subsidies? Should supply and demand be the ultimate weapon on choice in thinning out this herd of options?

All of these alternative technologies and the collective abundance of questions they generate lead me to wonder if it would be better to try and unite on one front in developing an energy approach for the future, instead of siphoning billions of dollars towards a slurry of new waste-composed biofuel methodologies for producing ethanol and methanol, or wind power, or solar power, or electric transportation vehicles, or …

Granted, I have my opinions on which methodologies I think will work the best, but let’s put that aside for right now, and for those of you knee-deep in a response championing your “obvious” choice, I’d ask for the same courtesy. The bottom line is that each approach has it positives and negatives – all of which are worthy of debate, but that type of dialogue is what I perceive as the biggest potential issue.

Using the capitalist approach of social acceptance and wide-spread buy-in as the ultimate metric in determining the winning methodology is fine, provided we’re willing to accept that winner even if it does pose longer-term issues. After all, the ugly truth is that we’re a society driven by price and convenience. So in the face of initially higher prices for these alternative energy sources, the majority of consumers will gravitate towards the cheapest and easiest methodology – that’s why we still burn coal and have a limited number of E85 gas pumps.

Hybrid cars are neither cheap or easy to maintain and repair – which, along with performance sacrifices, is probably why less than one percent of vehicles on the road today are of the hybrid variety. Coal is cheap and easier to burn in generating power than sorting through food scraps, growing algae or developing some other feedstock to run through a special digester in order to produce electricity. Hydrogen, believe it or not, is still a viable option in many people’s minds as a transportation fuel source.

Seemingly unlimited funds are being thrown at all of these energy answers, which leads me to an unyielding belief that we’ve already found the solution to our problems. But is this on-going debate over the best approach hindering its implementation and doing more to preserve the status quo? It reminds me of a “new” technology on its way towards mobile and commercial cooling environments.

In the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, refrigerant use has changed a number of times in these applications over the course of the last 20 years. This has lead to wider spread use of carbon-dioxide as an alternative to chemical refrigerants like Freon, as it is able to perform even more efficiently and without the harmful emissions. It’s facing some resistance because of the higher operating pressures it demands, but it seems to be more about when, as opposed to if CO2 will replace R-134a in a number of cooling applications.

The kicker here is that CO2 had been used in this manner at the beginning of the 20^th century – it’s far from a new technology or application. Yet think of all the development dollars and negative environmental impact that was registered over the past 100 years in order to come full circle.

We live in a time of great potential and promise in answering our energy concerns. The question that remains is if a divided approach will deliver the most powerful solution.

What are your thoughts? Share your comments and opinions below or send them to jeff.reinke@advatnagemedia.com.

Sometimes coming up with a new idea can be a difficult and annoying task.

by Meaghan Ziemba, Associate Editor, PD&D

Personally, when I try to think of something to write for blogs, editorials, homework assignments or even a simple errand list, I catch myself in a blank stare trying to remember what I was thinking about in the first place.

To add another obstacle in my composition process, I have a 5-year-old daughter who constantly wants me to watch her newest dance, look at her new piece of art, swimming or whatever else she has discovered on her own. When I return to my work I have to start completely over.

Distractions constantly haunt the creative minds trying to think of innovational ideas, and when they grab hold, it can be quite an obstacle to overcome.

I can only imagine the sort of obstacles engineers and manufacturers face when trying to think of the next “big thing.” Whether in electronics, automotive or the mechanical industries, engineers and manufacturers have the stress of satisfying customers on a daily basis. If they disappoint, it could affect their reputation as whole, and send companies into a downward spiral of never ending ridicule and criticism.

What’s the solution? A recent visit to Waukesha, WI for a National Instruments (NI) preview of their newest products provided a simple answer, teamwork; but not in the sense that would be the typical assumption of teamwork.

During the keynote, Jonathan Hillayard, area sales manager for NI, discussed the challenges of innovation. He discussed how some believed that the reasons for the economic woes were believed to be caused by the slow down of innovation. He also talked about how National Instruments set a goal to release a new version of their LabVIEW software every year to help incorporate feedback faster from their customers. With scheduled launch releases, customers had a chance to increase innovational materials.

I sat in a couple other sessions at NI Technical Symposium, and the same idea of customer feedback was stressed throughout. At demonstration the presenter specified the importance of customer comments, complaints and/or suggestions. If there was something missing, buyers had a chance to speak their mind and offer ideas to increase quality and operational success.

Of course this is a common practice, but it was reassuring to see it first hand. Sometimes a lot of customers ignore the suggestion box offered by certain companies, missing out on the planning process to possibly improve our favorite designs.

Innovation seems to be hindered by the intimidation of failure, but if more of us are willing to raise our hands and offer our constructive criticisms and appreciative applause, we create a stronger team and become that much closer to the next “big thing.”

Do you have an idea that could make heads turn, or a suggestion to make a current idea more phenomenal? Share it with the rest of us. Post your innovational thoughts below or send them to me at meaghan.ziemba@advantagemedia.com.

by Anna Wells, Editor, IMPO

My friends and I like to play a lot of off-the-cuff word games. For example, my friend posed this question to the group last night:

If you were able to ride any animal, real or fictional, into battle, which would it be? The eventual winner, by group vote, was Falkor—the giant flying dog from The NeverEnding Story. The games are certainly without limits:

• Refrigerated condiments you’d use in a fight? Ketchup or barbecue sauce? Maybe Tabasco?
• Weapon you’d use when fighting zombies?
• Top 3 athletes you’d banish from professional sports if you could?
• Lifetime access to only the radio or only your five favorite albums?

Sometimes our games are simply diversions with no outcome other than laughter or breathless defenses on whether or not a crocodile could beat a lion in a duel (on land, of course). Other times, our open-ended question and answer sessions actually digress into something constructive where we generate ideas and share opinions on topics of actual importance to our lives and the greater good. The important part is not where the conversation begins, but where it ends. My friends are a quick-witted talented bunch, and I like witnessing their brains in action.

In my office, the editors have the good fortune of having adjacent offices, meaning we have the opportunity to engage one another in dialogue throughout the day. It’s these spur-of-the-moment jam sessions that oftentimes generate the seedlings of future successful endeavors. It’s also interesting to see the perspectives of people who don’t think the same way as you do.

I have never worked for a company where we didn’t make fun of the company newsletter. That said, we all read it. Why? Because part of the fun of the work environment is camaraderie and (sorry HR) a mutual scorn for the funny photo contest. But lucky for me, the company I work for is used to our odd-ball digressions—in fact, they encourage us to break out into small discussions throughout the day, and provide feedback on the progress of our own projects, and the projects of others. It stands to reason that if something is working well in one area of the company, it has a shot at working elsewhere. Oftentimes we just need to hammer out the specifics and decide, through our sometimes meandering dialogue, whether or not it’s worth a shot.

I truly believe that it’s this type an open forum that breeds initiative. Make sure your team knows the lines of communication are open. Sometimes a manager’s “open door policy” is too intimidating; maybe you need something more low key. Raising your hand in a structured meeting, or seeking out your boss behind his or her desk, is not always the easiest way to convey ideas—in fact, it sometimes seems too formal for the “little things.” Try anonymous suggestion boxes in the break room. Even better—go into the break room once in a while and ask questions. Does the new layout work well for the folks on the line? Are there hang-ups that seem too small to warrant asking for a formal fix? You might be surprised what you find out.

And if you run out of things to talk about, here’s a good one: Would you rather be able to fly, or breathe underwater?

I still haven’t made up my mind on this one.

Have you made up your mind? Would Tabasco make for the best condiment weapon? And is communication too often forgotten in the workplace? Let me know your thoughts: anna.wells@advantagemedia.com.