Staying Afloat

[klsears]

I wanted to get some opinions about dealing with growing responsibilities at work. I started at my current job as a Design Engineer and was purely tasked with dealing with any new design projects, but also bringing old products into the CAD system from paper. The later never took off because new projects and other tasks quickly took over all my time. I'm located at a manufacturing plant in one state, where the R&D group and fellow Design Engineers are located in another state. At one point, I was "transferred" to supervision under the R&D group, with dotted line locally. Due to being in a manufacturing facility, I was always pulled into manufacturing issues and tool/fixture design as needed. After feeling like a rag doll for a few years getting tugged about by differing priorities, I asked to transfer back to local management and contribute more to my local facility. I enjoy any kind of design/development work so manufacturing vs. R&D doesn't matter much as I've gotten good experience in both areas. They gave me the title Process Engineer and put me back under the local Mfg. Eng. I thought that would be the end of it and projects would begin to be local only. So, I'm still doing both kinds of work and now even getting into process activity also.

So I have a job where I gain experience in many areas of R&D and manufacturing, but feel I'm spread too thin and can't give my best to any project. R&D project priorities conflict with manufacturing timelines and it's driving me crazy. You'd think someone would be happy with access to different kinds of projects and I am, but the drawbacks are wearing me down. I feel like if I ask to remove any type of work, it won't be looked at well, despite the ability to do better with the type of work I retain. If I ask for soley R&D work, I may as well work from home because if I come this place, I'll get asked to do any number of other tasks.

Any thoughts? Is it too much to ask to have one job title and the work that goes with it?

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Sears
United Pet Group

 

[KENAT]

One job title won't necessarily fix this issue. I only have one job title but I get pulled from pillar to post depending on managements whims, and my own unwillingness to let colleagues flail if I can help it.

I wish I could give you some advice but as I haven't been able to resolve my issues I'm not sure what to tell you.

Only once in the last year has me pointing out this issue to the head of my dept actually been of any benefit. Several times he's tried to set priorities, but while they're OK at setting nominal precedence on projects around here they aren't good at accepting that if I'm working project 1 then project 2 may well be sat there for some time and so on.

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[GregLocock]

After 4 years of that we pointed out that compared with other facilities (we have five) our particular group was way below headcount for the number of projects we handle. This meant we were just doing the must-dos, and were falling behind in developing new approaches which is also part of our jobs.

So, the year before last we offloaded a whole bunch of work to a consultant, and earlier this year we finally got a new head, who has inherited a lot of the must-do work, and some of the new technique nice-to-haves.

I don't know how to translate that into your experience, but I'd be tempted to sever the dotted line back to R&D. After all, if you always bend over backwards to accommodate them then they'll just treat you as a flexible resource. Your local management should support you in this.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[Compositepro]

It sounds to me that things are generally going great for you and you need to learn to relax and not beat yourself-up. It appears that no one is complaining about your performance but you. The fact that everyone is coming to you to get things done means they recognize you as an effective worker. Do you know what the reward is for good work? More work! You need to learn to not focus on what you are not accomplishing and get satisfaction with what you are accomplishing.

I was a process engineer in manufacturing and R&D for most of my career.It was great work, although some bosses were better than others. I now own my own manufacturing business, which was always my goal. The main thing is to not do other peoples work for them. Provide guidance in solving problems but let people do the work to solve their own problems. Now, jobs like converting drawings from paper to CAD are really just hourly work, where your workout put is your work hours. If that is the kind of work you want, then you probably need to change companies because once people learn you can do more than that they won't leave you alone.