After 4 years at my first job out of college, I had come to my first career crossroads. I enjoyed the company I worked at and the people I worked with, but no longer felt like I was challenging myself enough in my work, especially my engineering technical skills. The company was large with numerous positions, and I had always been told if I saw an opportunity I wanted to pursue they would work with me to make it happen; so I looked. What I found was that advancing my career meant focusing even less on engineering, and more on either project management or supervising. While these are important positions for any company, they just didn’t appeal to me at this point in my career.
At the same time I was reading a book by David Epstein, “Range” which deals with how in a world with a focus on specialization, it’s the generalists, those who have a “range” of experiences who often lead to the best results. This book made me realize I had to leave my old job, as the narrow area of engineering I was working on, building automation controls, was going to hold me back in the long-term.
Looking for a new job only knowing I wanted to do something else brought a mental hurdle. “How do I find a new job if I don’t know what to look for?” Lucky for me it was during this time a had a few Hallam-ICS projects come across my desk. Their work was impressive and caught my attention. I realized being a consulting engineer was something that could appeal to me. After doing some research into Hallam-ICS, I also realized this was the sort of small, tight-knit company that I could envision myself at.
Six months later, after first deciding to get my EIT license, then waiting out the first few months of Covid-19 fearing a quick rejection due to market factors, did I finally apply. Upon explaining my wait to apply in the interview, I was jokingly teased for holding out so long. “We could’ve used you six months ago, you should’ve applied back then!” It was at that moment that I knew I had found my new home.
Having been here for a month now, I’ve already found myself doing work for three different business lines. Circling back to the book “Range,” I’ve always been someone who views themselves as more of a generalist then a specialist. Getting to work on a variety of projects is right up my alley. The fit couldn’t have been better!
.
