Let’s take stock of my efforts this year (and Dec 2020) at becoming a better engineer.
- Writing this Blog – The personal commitment to write regularly has pushed me to make improvements now, rather than waiting for “later”. The need to write about it has caused me to put in more whole-hearted effort rather just dabbling. Win-win overall for this effort! My goal is to write even more regularly in 2022.
- Ranking my Skills – Early in the year I categorized my different engineering skills and then ranked them (see post). This helped my sharpen my thinking on where to focus my improvement efforts. I plan on continuing this practice yearly (with improvements of course).
- Improving Analytic Skill – From my skill ranking I decided that I needed to work on my analytic skills by reviewing engineering subjects (see post). I bit off more than I could chew here and never really got off the ground.
- Study Organization – Because I was planning to do a lot of studying, I decided I needed to better organize what I learned. I created an organization skeleton for engineering topics (see post). This has been my most useful improvement this year. I now have tons of resources right at my fingertips. One example of when this came in handy – in the middle of a design review, I was able to lookup necessary info on Nitronic 60 and make the decision on whether to make the switch from 316 Stainless. It took less than 60 seconds. Normally in a design review the decision couldn’t be made just flagged to be looked into. Organized notes has been a huge time saver. The value of my notes will only compound with time as I add even more.
- Solidworks Skills – I wrote two posts (one and two) on this but most of the work happened in 2020.
- Manual Machining Class – I just finished a manual machining class at the local community college. It was hugely beneficial for me (previously my lathe skills were pathetic) and I have already used them at work. I haven’t written a post on this yet but plan to. I am taking the CNC Machining class this next semester.
- Publishing this Blog – I started out with a free wordpress.com blog that no one knew about. At the end of 2021 I finally built up the courage to start sharing what I am writing. 🙂
- Tons of other growth – I learn a mountain of stuff every year that comes about naturally because of my projects. I now know a ton about FDA approval (and EUA). I learned a bunch about lithium batteries and their unique regulatory nightmares. I also worked on an internal company initiative to improve our tech lead trainings. All this continuous learning is the number one reason I love my job so much.
I look forward to seeing what next year brings.