10 MISTAKES THAT YOUNG MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERS MAKE

Audio: 10 mistakes that young mechanical design engineers make

We all must start our professional life sometimes. We all have been at the beginning, and some of you are at that point right now. Throughout my career, I had a chance to talk with many interesting people. When you talk with people, and you really listen to what they are saying, you can learn a lot. I heard different opinions and perspectives on many topics, including the young people entering the workforce. In this article, I will write about 10 mistakes that young mechanical design engineers make. I made some of these mistakes myself, and some of these were brought up by others so many times that I had to include them in this list.

Introduction

If you have been studying mechanical engineering, you have been through many different courses and have covered a wide range of topics. However, a lot of things that you just do not learn at the university are equally important for your career success. That is the reason why I am writing this article.

Knowing what we are doing wrong sometimes is more important than knowing what we are doing right. Usually, the mistakes we make, especially if we have a pattern of behavior, mean we have a blind spot. Figuring out our blind spots can get us to a new level. This list contains the ten most common mistakes that I noticed that young mechanical design engineers are making.

So let us dive into it!

1. Title superiority

It makes me mad that I even must put this one on the list, but this is one of the most common things I heard people complain about. I worked in different countries and cities. I had a chance to talk with various people with different interesting experiences in life. One of the most common mistakes they said is that young engineers would come with their fancy university diplomas and act like they are somehow better or above the people who do not have a university diploma.

I was born in the eastern part of Croatia and grew up in a working-class family. I was always surrendered by people with no higher education, and I am not even sure that I knew anyone with a university diploma (except my teachers and professors) until I started my studies. I was the first in my family that finished higher education. Furthermore, I spent most of my life working hard, laborious jobs before landing an office job.

We as humans are fascinating creatures: we are smart and stupid, lazy and hardworking, spontaneous and deliberate, creative and unimaginative, interesting and dull, simple and complex. We get into the deep philosophy about life or sport; we drink, dance, we make mistakes, laugh, cry, help and hurt each other, etc. But, of course, most humans are not only one of these things; we are usually a mix. My point is that we are all complex beings with good and bad sides to our personalities, and just because you have a higher education does not make you a better person that does not have it.

Having a university diploma probably shows that you are academically suited, a person with dedication and persistence, but it does not make you a good person. We, as humans, often underestimate or overestimate ourselves. In this case, do not overestimate yourself just because you won a geographical lottery and were born in the country that gave you access to higher education. If we consider a person born in a third-world country in absolute poverty who managed to finish higher education, does it make this person better than you?

Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that you should not be proud of your achievements; I am just saying that you should not be arrogant about it. I am very proud of my master’s degree, and you will not see me running around and rubbing it in every person’s face. You will also not see me disregarding the value of someone’s opinion just because they do not have the same education level as I do.

With that being said, keep your feet down on the ground, stay humble, and keep grinding.

2. Focus only on work, not on people

Once you start working in the company, you will have an opportunity to meet many new and interesting people who are often experts in their field. I can understand that when you start a new job, you might be frightened and overwhelmed. You will keep your head stuck in the monitor and work as crazy. Before you know it, a year will pass, and you will have no connections in your company. Do not make this mistake!

You should definitely try to find the balance between doing the work and networking. It will not kill you if you take ten minutes and talk with your coworkers and try to form a connection with them. People will not remember you by your actions; they will remember you by the feeling you leave them with after your encounter.

This leads me to the second point I would like to make. Usually, engineers, in general, are more focused on technically related things than anything else. While that is the right approach to some extent, depending on how you envision your career, at some point, you will not move anywhere without properly developed communications skills. I wrote in more detail about the communication skills in Required skills for Mechanical design engineer – part 1.

3. Not asking for help

There is no shame in not knowing something; no one is born with all the world’s knowledge. I met many people who would not ask for help even if their life depended on it. I would say for people starting to work, there is a mix of shame (they think they should know, but they do not) and fear (how people will react to them not knowing).

Depending on the problem, its difficulty, and its complexity, I usually follow a simple rule: if I cannot figure it out in five to ten minutes before I spend more time on it, I would talk with other people I think might help me. Either they can help me directly or point me in the direction of someone who can.

This could lead you to get the solution ten times faster than if you tried to do it yourself. Do not make the mistake of reinventing the wheel.

If you do not find the solution, you must understand that your time is always costing your company. So, your manager’s responsibility is to use your time most efficiently. If you follow the rule I gave you above, you can go to your manager and tell him that you investigated the topic, tried “a, b, c,” and talked with the “X, Y, Z” person, and no one can help you. Then you ask him about the priority level and ask him for permission to spend your time chasing a solution for that specific problem.

4. Not talking with colleagues from different departments

When developing a new product, we are concerned about the needs and requests of our end customers. However, if we want our product to succeed, we must also consider the requirements of different departments involved in the product launch.

That means you should talk with your colleagues working in marketing, quality, service, production, etc. You want to incorporate as many requirements from their side in your design. Even if you would meet all the end-customer needs, for example, if your product is not serviceable or if costs are too high, the product will not be successful.

I suggest you talk with your colleagues or host an online meeting to ask them for feedback. Go to production and ask them about their input on assembly procedures, drawing notes, etc. Get feedback from as many colleagues as possible as soon as possible. This will allow you to adjust your design to fit all the needs in the early stage. The worst thing that could happen is to get the product into the production phase, and then you have to optimize your design because you made some mistakes that could have been addressed earlier.

5. Not organizing e-mail

This is one of the mistakes I made when I started working as a mechanical design engineer. I believe that I really did not realize how much input and output information I would send and receive daily. Once I got to thousand unsorted e-mails, I realized I must start organizing them. But once your inbox is packed with different projects, project phases, and e-mails from various departments related to different issues, it is really hard to clean it up. And other e-mails just keep coming.

And that just looks sloppy. Someone would ask me for an e-mail, and I would try to remember who sent it or what was the e-mail topic. I would violate the search button until I found something similar to what I was looking for. And then you have e-mails named under one project and inside of the e-mail discussion about the other one. This made me look quite unprofessional.

I realized that most people (including me) do not even know the possibilities of the e-mail software they are using. So, I would say that learning to properly use e-mail software would be the first step. The next step is to organize your e-mail in folders and subfolders with different categories.

Having your e-mail cleaned up and adequately organized will make your life much easier and make you look more professional. Read more about e-mail organization here: E-mail organization for mechanical design engineers.

Following the steps in the article about e-mail organization gave me a bunch of “you are so organized” compliments.

6. Not taking notes

The next one on my list is younglings’ classic mistake of not writing down work-related notes. It happened to me more than I could count. It happens to all of us; the weekend comes, and we drink one or two too much. On Monday, you basically reset yourself to factory settings. You do not know what you did last week and what you should do next. Maybe, this is a slightly exaggerated example, but it will happen to you that you will leave on PTO for two weeks, and you will have no idea what you did before you left.

For that reason, you should:

Keep your design journal constantly updated (basically, track the progress of your design ideas, changes, calculation, sketches, etc., why you did them, and when).
Keep a meeting journal, a short overview of the meeting with the most important bullet points mentioned during the meeting. You should, if no one shared, share these notes via e-mail with others to give a short recap of the meeting (so-called “meeting minutes”). This will also provide a chance for everyone else to read it and refresh their memory, and in some cases, to clarify some ambiguous points. Furthermore, it is always a good idea to have everything agreed during the meeting in writing as evidence of agreement.
Keeping notes about your tasks and creating a knowledge base are covered in the following two points.

7. Not tracking your tasks

You will have tasks that will take a few months to finish and tasks that will take a few days or hours to complete. Also, I am almost sure that at some point, your job will become highly chaotic and stressful. Deadlines will approach, you have a few different things to finish, your equipment is not working correctly, and your experiments are not going according to plan.

With all this at once, you will have unexpected meetings and visits or calls from a bunch of different people. Furthermore, as in the previous point, you will be absent from your work from time to time, and you will have to continue working on some tasks that you started before you left the company.

Taking all this into account, there is a simple rule: what is not written will be forgotten. You can write your task on paper or on your PC in numerous software. Choose what you feel most comfortable with. I would suggest you write one task list as a general overview of your tasks and priorities and the second one only with the priorities (or subtasks) for the upcoming week. Keep the second one in a visible place.

When you have long-lasting tasks, write the progress down as you move forward.

For example: DATE, drawing sent to supplier XYZ, waiting for a quote,

or DATE, e-mail sent to AB for color clarification.

That will later follow up with:

DATE, quote received and reviewed, check project XYZ folder quotes, part KL, quote forwarded to finance department, waiting for an update,

or DATE, color clarified, check Project XYZ color approval folder. This will give you a progress overview and the locations of all relevant files.

8. Not creating a knowledge database

When you start working in your new company, you will learn a million new things. You will have to learn how internal processes work, from tracking your hours to procedures for ordering parts, ECR processes, different approval procedures, different suppliers, etc. It happened to me that I would have to go and ask people about something that I would not need again in a few months and then again go and ask about it.

The best way to keep track of this is to create a knowledge base. You want to write all the relevant information about the company, processes, contact, and responsible persons for different tasks. In addition, you should write all steps used for various software for the different operations you will have to do.

Anything that, if it is not written and will require you to ask basic questions over and over again should be written in your knowledge base. Furthermore, you can write industry-related or mechanical engineer-relevant information in your knowledge base. For example, exciting problems you solved with different learning points, design rules for various technologies you learned from your supplier or other experts, etc.

9. Not covering basics

I often noticed amongst the young mechanical design engineers that they aim for complicated high-level work immediately after they start working. While I find that praiseworthy, the problem is that they mainly do not master the basics.

What I mean by “basics” is either the internal company processes or the mechanical engineering fundamentals. When you start working in the company, if you pay enough attention, you will figure out what processes and knowledge are crucial for the company. An example of the company’s essential processes would be maintaining the ERP system data for different parts. An example of essential knowledge usually is creating engineering drawings, tolerances, and material properties; some manufacturing technologies are used more than others, some are not used et all, etc.

If you would identify these crucial points and focus your energy on learning them, you will definitely achieve great success in the long run in your work position.

10. Not learning

The mindset: “now that I have finished my studies and started working, I do not have to learn anymore” is the path that does not lead to a successful career. Why is this case with some people? I really do not know. Is that something that has to do with the title superiority, and now when they have an engineering degree, they think they have all the knowledge? I really cannot tell.

The university prepares you for industry work (at least it should). But mechanical engineering is a vast field, and you will learn the job while doing the job; you cannot learn everything in your studies. In the process of you learning the job, the world keeps moving forward. The world will not wait for you to catch up.

In addition to the fundamental engineering knowledge, you have to learn about the industry that you are working in, but as you are learning about the industry, the industry is changing and evolving. New technologies are coming out, new software is coming out, and society and trends are changing. As I said, the world will not wait for you.

How much you should learn each day, I cannot tell you. This depends on your personal preferences, goals and ambitions, and your idea of success in life. You can decide not to spend any time learning new skills, or you can choose to spend one hour a day or maybe five hours a day. This is entirely up to you. What I can say for sure is that if you do make this mistake and do not decide to invest time in learning, you will get stuck in your current position without any future prospects for advancement in your career.

Closing words

Once you start working in your new position, you will undergo an onboarding process. Usually, you will not be immediately thrown into new projects. Instead, your colleagues will show you various software they are using, show you internal procedures, introduce you to the other colleagues, etc. This gives you plenty of time to organize from the start and give you an advantage when you get to the point of working on new projects.

You should use this initial period to connect and get to know the people you are working with and organize your e-mail and knowledge base with the notes and guides for all the initial steps you learned. Furthermore, during this initial period, you will already start to notice essential points in the company, and you can begin planning to improve and learn in those areas.

Being aware of these ten mistakes and avoiding them cannot guarantee you success in your career (there is no guarantee in life), but I can guarantee that avoiding them will undoubtedly help. Some of these mistakes I never made, some of them I did a lot, and for some of them, it took me a long time to realize that I was doing them, but once I sorted them out, personally, I achieved great success.

This was my opinion on the mistakes that young mechanical design engineers make. What do you think? Did I overlook any of the mistakes that you find equally important? Share your experience and thoughts in the comments below!

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