Lack of Self-Confidence at work 8

[OilBoiler]

Hey everyone,

I'm a recent May graduate and have worked in my company since then including an internship last year.

I just wanted to know if when you first started as an engineer, you felt like you really didn't much have self-confidence? That's how I feel right now and sometimes very overwhelmed, but my supervisor keeps telling me that I need to be patient with myself and take it one day at a time. And of course to remember to learn something new every day.

Thanks!

 

[IRstuff]

If you are indeed learning AND retaining, then you should have little to worry about.

As you become more proficient and comfortable with doing new things, your confidence will likewise increase.

After all, the company had enough confidence in you to hire you.

TTFN

 

[MadMango]

Also remember that you are going to make mistakes, no matter how careful you try to be. Just learn from them and pass that knowledge along to others.

[green]"But what... is it good for?"[/green]
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[PSE]

Confidence will come when you start getting and building on small successes. Initially, you are still trying to learn how the company works (Who needs what, where, when, how, what format etc) at a level that your internship could not provide. Sounds like you have a good Supervisor to start off with. Biggest confidence boosts will come when someone comes back to you and thanks you for helping them out on a problem. Get a few of those and you'll be off and rolling.

Regards,

 

[Rich2001]

I have an hour commute each way to and from my office and then some days several hours to differing job sites, so I listen to audio tapes, friction, and non-friction. (Some good, many pure trash) This is from one I listen to a few weeks ago that Ii picked up at the library

Based on how well or not so well that we accomplish task self-confidence can grow or falter. It is how one feels about oneself. We all tend to base our own personal values on how successfully we perform in different situations and we often require perfect performance of ourselves. Failure to obtain our perfect standards, we end up lowering our self-confidence. Society values flawless performance and places great emphasis on winning and performing perfectly. One loses sight of the fact that we can value ourselves in spite of making mistakes

How can we go about increasing our self-confidence, when we discover it decreasing?

1. Make a list of the things that they do like about themselves. Rediscover those very likable qualities about ourselves that we often take for granted.

2. Take some time to do something for oneself, something enjoyable.

Continued frustration or attempting things that we have difficulty with can lead to feelings of clumsiness and inadequacy. It doesn’t take long when we experience these feelings to find our self-confidence seems to have decreased.

Make a list of the things that we do well and to do one of these things on the list everyday.


Find a mentor, your supervisor sound like he is a good, but if you want some one outside of work try the NSPE Mentoring program

http://www.nspe.org/pd1-mentoring.asp

. In addition, other technical societies have mentoring programs.

 

[BJC]

This reminds me of the joke.
"How do you tell an extroverted engineer?
Ans. He looks at your shoes when he talks to you, not his."
The best thing to do is use what you know and to know what you don't know where and/or from who to find it.
Also know what things are critical and which are not.
If you do ten things a day and get three wrong you got seven right. Your seven ahead of the guy who was indecisive and did nothing.

 

[McCormick93]

Everyone starts at square one. You are probably comparing yourself to people who have 5 or 10 or more years experience. Remember you are still in your first year. Graduating is a good place to start, but doesn't make you an instant Expert on Everything.

I'd rather hire someone who knows they have a lot to learn, than someone who appears to know it all (they don't).

 

[nwm94]

I think most employers are aware what they are getting with an engineer straight out of college. It takes time to develop, and that's why we have to be EIT's. As one of my bosses told me (he was not an engineer), "We are going to overpay you for the next 4 years in the hopes that you'll stick around to be underpaid as a PE". He was laughing when he said it, but it was pretty accurate.

Please take advantage of this time to learn your job and ask as many questions as you can, no matter how silly they seem. Making mistakes at this stage of your career is essential and no one is going to hang you for them as long as you don't repeat the same mistakes over and over. McCormick93 is right, don't appear to know it all when you don't. No one will go out of their way to help you if you have an ego. You don't seem like you have one, but stay humble.

 

[BJC]

NMW is right on.
People don't mind being asked questions. It gives them a chance to show what they know. Why do you think there are so many people on this forum. Some ask questions, most are here to volenteer help.

 

[GeneratorGrrl]

I know exactly how you feel, OilBoiler. Particularly as I'm the only woman where I work. Its intimidating to be put onto a project and be expected to figure it out, and worse to be expected to fail because, well, you're a chick. You have a lot to prove to everyone, and most of all, to yourself.

I found out quickly that school only taught me how much I didn't know. School gives you all the problem variables and tells you which formulae to apply; then you get onto the job and nothing is cut and dried at all, sometimes its pulling teeth to get even one variable. We've all been there, all had our young'n'eager graduate egos kicked in, and we all took your supervisor's advice. Just be patient with yourself. You *will* make mistakes. You may get teased for it; brush it off and if you have to, remind the teasers that they were once fresh off the boat themselves.

Something that helps me is to ask myself, after I come home from work and sat down with a cup of tea, "What did I learn today?" If I solved a problem by drawing on a previous experience, I'll remind myself of that; that's me on the road to becoming a senior engineer. School shows you the base of the mountain and gives you your picks and crampons. They may be further up the mountain than you are, but they left their hooks for you to use. They did it, and so can you.

"Eat well, exercise regularly, die anyways."

 

[IRstuff]

You've hit on one of the key differences that distinguish senior engineers. The ability and experience to be able to say, "this parameter should be xx," allows management to let you run on your own, as opposed to having to constantly feed you with scenarios and parameter values.

TTFN

 

[IRstuff]

Actually, it gets more fun when your customer gives you requirements that do no satisfy higher level requirements that your customer is supposed to meet.

Then, you get to your customer that he's an idiot; politely, of course. ;-)

Just had that happen on a proposal we submitted. Knowing what the correct answer should be ought to be a good discriminator, assuming that the customer picked up on that at all.

TTFN

 

[JAE]

Oilboiler - give yourself a couple of years, maybe even three - it all depends on how much work your supervisors are giving you.

In my case, and with many fellow engineers I know, an engineer goes through the following evolution:

1. Starts out pretty confident, after all you graduated, have a great new job, and you are used to being the "senior" person around school. This ends after the first couple of days on the job.

2. For the first few months, feelings of Ohmygosh jump in every so often as you are given work and you feel like those around you are all focusing on your performance and, well, you'd better not screw up or everyone will shake their heads at your utter "green-ness"....you are the center of the universe in your own eyes, but in reality, most others don't really notice or don't care.

3. After stage 2 you settle down a bit, get into some semblance of a routine and begin to know how to do certain tasks. You still feel very uncertain at times and find yourself asking more and more questions.

4. After a couple of years, you can be given a variety of tasks but you still feel like the hammer will drop at any time when someone will require you to do something you have no clue how to approach. Still lots of questions of your supervisors - a very knee jerk reaction when you find yourself getting up from your desk to go ask - to make sure you're doing it right.

5. After three years or so you finally realize, as you are walking over to ask your supervisor another question, that, jeez, I know the answer and my supervisor doesn't really have a clue as to all the parameters involved in this particular problem. You turn around on your heels and go back to your desk....but still a little queazy.

6. At some point, you just swallow and DO YOUR JOB, feeling that if you don't know how to do it, then you will simply find out, research it, etc.

7. Even after 30 years you still have questions, still have doubts, but that old "will I be revealed to all as a phony" feeling is quite dim.

 

[Tobalcane]

During college I did two summer internships at a national laboratory. It was great; it was just like school, but with bigger toys. I felt confident that I can work in the engineering world (well at a lab) and hit the ground running as soon I was hired. But when I graduated, the lab was going thru a valley in hiring so I could not get a job.

When I got my first engineering job at a defense company that was when reality hit hard, especially in manufacturing where I first started. At the lab it was more academic, but in the real world they kept to a time table and cost matrix. The reason my boss put me in manufacturing (designing test fixtures and some process engineering tasks) first was to get my feet wet and to get a chance to see how the company worked. In essence I had to get over a learning curve. I had to learn how we manufacture before I can design. At first it was tough because of the fast pace and the hesitation of making a decision in fear of being wrong. But as the weeks went by, I started to gain more confidence in my self. It was just a matter of time to get over the learning curve and growing pain.

My advice would be to do the task that they ask of you and observe how your company works. Once you get the gist of how your company works and what the company expects of you, your confidence will start to rise.

Good Luck!


Go Mechanical Engineering
Tobalcane

 

[whyun]

Learning curve is always the steepest during the first few years of one's engineering career. The curve flattens as years pass by. Make every effort to not let this curve be horizontal or even go downwards. As much as we want to retain everything we learn, we all tend to forget more as we age...

Company should never expect a new graduate to know everything. There should be a good training program in place where junior staff gets assigned to assisting senior level engineers to perform task specific duties. This is part of the training. If the training program is not in place, I recommend looking for another job. Picking up good habits the first few years as an engineer is extremely precious.

 

[71corvette]

I wouldn't get too worried about it. I felt exactly the same way starting out and now five years later I am quite confident in myslef and my managers are very pleased with my performance. For a while I was quite paranoid about being fired, mostly because I was much, much harder on myself than those working with me.

I first needed to learn two very important things:

1. I knew little to nothing about real-world engineering when I graduated. It took two years just to familiarize myself enough with the codes I use on a daily basis.

2. Most everything will probably take twice as long to do as you intitally think it should. Don't get to worried if you think you're working to slowly. Rushing to be more "efficient" only makes things worse.

 

[OilBoiler]

Thank you all!

I really appreciate your feedback. Thank God, all my coworkers seem to be "impressed" with my work and have congratulated me with a few projects I've done so far. But I felt weird, because honestly I felt like I didn't deserve their congratulations. I felt like I didn't do those things on time, or I just took too much time reading the very basics that I felt "I should've known."

My company is really good about this and I have a mentor who has been extremely helpful. Also, my supervisor is really cool and understanding and extremely supportive and repeats all along what you all just told me. I'm still quite stressed out, but I think is all part of being very hard on myself. It's been getting better in the past few months though.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

[ghghghgh]

It sounds like you have a good environment to develop so enjoy this time period of your career and take advantage of it while it lasts. Gradually, budgets, deadlines, contractor questions, profitability, personnel issues, legal wrangling, etc. will become your responsibility and you'll find ownership becomes less understanding and more demanding. You're still some years away, so learn, learn, learn....

 

[cardoso115]

It's natural to feel that way... I felt it too. I think that it is mainly because the fear of not being able to get the job done. One thing that I did was to go through the previous projects of the company, and with it I've learned some new tricks and seen that the circuits printed in those boards or the control software could have been developed by me...
Another thing that is difficult but doesn't hurt is to admit not to know something but that you're willing to learn it. This will impress even more your employer


And don't dwell on your mistakes, learn with them and carry on!
My company has a policy that says "Making a mistake is human, repeating it, is not!".

Lot's of luck in your future!

 

[APH]

I feel that way for time to time, especially when you're in the new place handling new stuff that you have very little background. Sometimes it is easier to ask forgiveness and permission, and learn from your mistake. I found out that being pro-active help solve problems, eventhough sometimes it takes longer to do the research than asking your supervisor the answer. 4 years ago, when I was still just finished school, very stubburn, and very idealistic, I was being hard on my self just like you discribed. I wanted everything to be perfect, etc. Now, I learn that everything can't be perfect, I need to choose wisely which part of my design need to be perfect. It is all about balance, between good-fast-cheap methodical.

Take advantage of your boss character, learn and build relationship with him. It sucks when you have no mentor, no role model, and you need to go thru it by your self. A good manager is everywhere, but a good manager who is willing to mentor you is very hard to find.

Good luck.
APH