"Actual Experience" Doesn't Match Number of Years of Experience 6

[Moebius85]

Hello,

After working at local full service A/E firm for five years, I got a job at a structural engineering firm last year. The reason I had made the change was because a)I was the only structural engineer, besides the owner, and so there wasn't enough work volume for me to be challenged or to continue to learn and develop my skills b) I didn't believe I was being paid enough.
Just before my 1 year anniversary at the structural engineering firm, I was fired because my performance did not meet their standards. One common theme that was present in my performance reviews was "for his experience, he should have more job knowledge" "for someone of his experience, he should know this, or know that" ...etc. and that I should be more productive.
I guess based on 5 years of experience, they expected more of an independent/senior role than my actual experience warranted. The reason I say "actual experience" is because during this past year I realized how bad my 5 year experience with the other firm was. One example of this is that project budget was rarely brought up, so I never developed the necessary time management skills in order to be efficient with my time. A lot of times, I never learned how to design certain things because my former boss, when asked, would just say "use this size plate" or "this size bolt" and so on.
I still learned a great deal during this past year, but now I have this dilemma. My resume says I have nearly nine years of experience (this includes 3 years overseas, which is not very relevant to the US AEC industry) with several varied types of projects, but my actual skills are not at the level of someone with equal years of proper structural engineering experience.
I'm in the process of looking for jobs now. Any advice anyone can offer is greatly appreciated. Sorry for the long post.

 

[CWB1]

The biggest efficiency improvements for me personally have been surprisingly simple and not particularly engineering related. First and foremost is simply being aware of your workflow and identifying inefficiency and lost time. Usually these revolve around struggle, if you find something difficult or tedious then you probably need to work to improve that task for next time. Another key is simply creating a written to-do list and subdividing tasks into the smallest reasonable segments. Smaller tasks are easier to complete, easier to track, and help motivate you by showing better progress on necessary tasks. The to-do list also helps focus you on accomplishing a single task at a time bc jumping from task-task is ridiculously inefficient. Force yourself to be organized in every way possible.

I would strongly caution against rules of thumb, guess work, or otherwise not giving due diligence to your work as a matter of ethics. Granted, small contract design firms' bottom line is driven by pushing out half-baked work as quickly as possible by any means possible however in more competent company folks will challenge you on minor details. Even top engineering salaries are a pittance compared to the cost of rework due to sloppy work. When a senior manager asks about the clamp load in a bolted joint or stress in a beam the last thing you want to admit is not giving the analysis due diligence, much less basing any portion of your design on somebody's rule of thumb that you dont understand the limitations of. Basically, if you cant produce the reason for the rule of thumb within a minute, dont do it. Take the time, create a spreadsheet or app if you think it will help, do the work, and learn the material. Over time you will be surprised with the seemingly minor details you retain.