There are a number of common second interview questions youâll need to be ready for if you want to progress through the hiring process. Some are simple, some are tricky, but theyâre all important. This list of questions youâll likely be asked during a second interview will help you prepare effective answers that make a […]
The post 21 Common Second Interview Questions & Answers (2022) appeared first on Career Sherpa.
Can engineering benefit from the lean principles of waste? The simple answer is yes!
To begin, what are the lean wastes?
Do engineers waste time? NEVER!!! Are you sure? How long did it take you to look up a part number for your last project? Have you spent hours on the internet combing for the perfect transformer? Did you rework the drawing because it was missing information? All of these take time.
Time is an engineerâs best asset. With any project, more time is always preferred. Despite our best efforts, everything has a deadline, and you will be out of time. So why do things take so long to accomplish?
Much like production, everything an engineer does has a processâformally or informally. If your process requires you to do unnecessary tasks or wait in a queue for information, it all takes away from our time.
Review what it truly takes to complete a task versus the total time to complete an action. The difference is your opportunity. How can you make tweaks or eliminate wasteful tasks to improve your time?
In the classical sense, engineering typically does not have dozens of parts on their desks or stacks of products on the shelves.
How many projects are on your desk needing your attention? How many drawings need revisions from production markups and changes? Do you have software programs written for customers? How many documents need approval?
Each of these âsoftâ products is inventory. Thinking broader, any accumulation of work ahead of you is your inventory. The more projects, tasks, and activities on your desk, the higher the inventory for you as a worker. How do we deplete inventory?
For administrative tasks, plan a time every day to work through the tasks. Approvals in the ERP system are complete at 9 am each day. Drawing reviews are scheduled at 2 pm on Tuesday. Some days you may have five or more of these tasks, and other days you may have none. Scheduling your time to complete these tasks is essential.
Larger tasks can be managed the same way. Use large blocks of time with no meetings to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Make sure you take action weekly on these tasks to prevent overwhelming inventory numbers.
Finally, do you need to do this task at all? Delegate or eliminate the work. Is it necessary? Am I the right person to do it? If the answer is no, get rid of it!
The goal is to minimize your inventory and focus effort on where you add value.
Unlike production where work may be completed in different physical locations, engineers typically work in their station and may even be sedentary. So how do I eliminate motion?
Do you walk to meetings twice a day in a different part of the building? Do you need to cross the room to use the copier? Are you required to deliver signed documents to another member of the team? Is your telephone or headset across the desk?
Motion is trickier in an office setting; however, with some creativity, you can eliminate the waste. Can my meetings be scheduled back to back to keep from leaving your office as often? Do I rearrange my desk for better optimization of my mouse, keyboard, phone, etc.? Think outside of just walking back and forth.
âHow often do you need to wait for a customer to agree to a specification? Does accounting owe you a price for the transformer you are quoting? Is your boss sitting on the drawing approval needed to submit to the customer?
Each time an engineer waits for an answer or another process, this leads to waste. You cannot proceed without someone elseâs action. You rely on someoneâs actions to complete your own.
How do we eliminate waiting? It is inevitable to be waiting on someone. Can you send an email ahead of time asking for their help to approve the drawing? Could you call your customer asking for clarification versus sending an email? Could you walk something to the accounting department asking for their attention?
Find ways to eliminate or minimize wait times. Take proactive actions to ask for assistance. Ensure all the necessary information is available to the next person in the process. Look for those subtle little items that add up over time.
âBoth of these wastes involve doing more than what is expected. Throughout my career, I have been encouraged to under-promise and over-deliver. Why?
Of the wastes, I would say these two are the most difficult for engineering. We are expected to (over) produce products that exceed customer expectations.
Experience will tell an engineer when enough is enough. Over-designing a solution is a waste. Making more drawings than are necessary is a waste. Look for opportunities where you are handling the same item more than once. Can I do both tasks at the same time?
Be careful of the trap of tinkering with a project simply because you have time. If your work is complete, meets the need, and is robust, stop. Continuing to tweak is an example of overprocessing. Learn from your mentors what finished looks like!
Defects are an enormous opportunity for anyone to eliminate wastes! Who likes doing the same task twice because it was wrong? If an engineer needs to do rework, the results are wasted.
Similar to the goal of âzeroâ safety incidents, engineers need to strive for perfection. This goal is philosophically correct, and reality shows our human side. Mistakes will occur.
How do you eliminate these defects? If you make a mistake, begin by correcting it, and follow up with changes to keep the mistake from returning. Write a procedure, make a checklist, and educate yourself (and your team) to prevent the error. When you have âextra time,â check your work. We all get tunnel vision on projects, so taking another step to verify your efforts is valuable!
When mistakes occur, learn from them. Do not swipe them aside as a trivial element of your work. Take time to make improvements to eliminate the chance of error in the future. We all make mistakes⦠Some of us learn to keep from repeating them repeatedly.
The concept of eliminating wastes is paramount to a lean journey or continuous improvement. Look around every aspect of life, and you will observe wastes. Knowing what wastes look like is the first step. Your best opportunity is to find ways to eliminate them from your work. Make something better, eliminate an unnecessary step, error-proof your processes, and make things better.
So is TIM WOOD my friend? For years, the answer was no. I had no time for him in engineering because he worked in production. Now that I see him clearly, I embrace him and use him to make me, my team, and my company stronger.
YES â TIM WOOD is my friend!
Looking for a job has become relatively tough for many people. Even some professionals with advanced academic qualifications, such as bachelor's degrees and even MBAs, are currently having a rough time on the market. However, there are still plenty of jobs out there for the right candidates.
One of the ways of differentiating yourself from other job seekers is by having transferable skills. Broadly speaking, a transferable skill is an expertise that you can use across a wide range of industries.
According to the University of Southern California, many graduates change jobs as many as four times within a period of five years. If you are a job seeker, identifying your transferable skills and articulating them to employers is likely to increase your chances of getting a job.
Here are five transferable skills all job seekers need:
In almost every career, from banking to the hospitality industry, good communication skills are vital. As such, it would be to your advantage if you have the ability to articulate your ideas in writing as well as orally. Since communication normally involves more than one party, you should be a good listener as well.
Employers often look for people who can communicate with co-workers effectively and in an objective manner.
Don't know your workplace communication style? Take our FREE quiz today!
This is a vital skill in almost every field of work mainly because the majority of businesses generate revenue by solving problems that clients face daily.
For example, cloud-computing companies provide data storage solutions, thereby ensuring that their clients have a backup of data stored on site. Employees can access company data on the go knowing they have secure storage for their information. In such an environment, analytical skills are likely to come in handy when clients face problems such as uploading data or updating certain files. To solve those issues, one would have to identify and define the problem's parameters.
This skill also involves collecting and analyzing data in order to design creative solutions to complex problems.
Most organizations and business enterprises employ more than one employee. Because of this, it may not be possible to have all the employees in leadership positions. Therefore, a few employees who show the ability to lead generally take charge of the others.
Leadership is all about motivating fellow employees and leading them to work toward a common goal. In addition, leaders analyze tasks and set priorities for the other employees as well as identify and allocate resources that employees need.
Traditionally, businesses kept a few records such as sales, purchases, and salaries in-house. In most cases, this data was no more than a few gigabytes. However, the emergence of social media, the adoption of e-commerce by consumers, and the large number of data points generated by businesses and corporations have upended the traditional model of managing information. As a result, most employers need employees who can sort and present data objects in an understandable manner.
Information management also involves evaluating and synthesizing information against industry standards. Industries where you can apply this skill set include finance, education, manufacturing, and print media.
Project managers are in high demand in many industries. Your work as a project manager will involve planning projects, assessing potential risks associated with the project, allocating project finances appropriately, and overseeing the execution of the project on time.
You can use this transferable skill in industries such as education, energy, consulting, and even the military.
The job sector is becoming increasingly competitive with every passing day. With this in mind, job seekers need to broaden their horizons when searching for a job.
Leverage the power of transferable skills acquired in previous jobs to get ahead of the competition. Just remember to quantify these skills on your resume. Also, make sure to mention them in your job interview, and you'll surely stand out from the competition.
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I have had moments in my schooling that shine brightlyâplaying a card game in Mr. Ritter's 8th grade social studies class with the true purpose being to show just how difficult it was to survive the Holocaust as well as having an opportunity to create our own country using the same economic, social, and political characteristics that define authentic nation states. I also remember Ms. Ziemba's 9th grade English class where she would routinely pause our reading of fiction to allow us to predict what would happen next as well as my foreign language classes with Mrs. Kaneâ"Madame"âand Mr. Tellis where we would act out every day conversational scenarios using tone, props, and facial expressions.
While the content we were covering differed in each class, there was one commonalityâan emphasis on student engagement. Today, I try to pay forward the appreciation that I feel for my teachers, for making learning engaging, by mentoring new teachers on how best to engage their students through similar learner-centered practices. Educators are so much more than content specialists; they help shape the whole person. Educators facilitate the growth of student self-awareness, they flame the sparks of curiosity, and they can make connections between learning theory and real-world application.
Involving students in class is not just a feel-good practice; student engagement results in better student attention with attention leading to higher rates of student achievement. Here are eight considerations to keep in mind to not only make student engagement possible in a distracted and complex world but that also will, hopefully, bring you joy as an educator when you see your students light up like a sports stadium.
As a teaching coach, I often see well-meaning teachers planning a lesson around a fun student activity. I love that these teachers are keeping student interest front and center, but we canât forget that time with our students is limited, and we need to ensure that students are meeting certain content and skill-based standards. Instead, step one should be to develop your lesson objective and then consider how you will assess student learning outcomes in this lesson. After this, choose a student activity/task that will help students practice the learning outcome. Many students are driven by personal success; they will appreciate completing tasks and engaging in activities that they know will help them reach a defined goal.
Tip: Connect that learning goal to real-world relevance through articles, podcasts, videos, etc. Let students know how/where they might use this learning. How does this learning help explain the world around us?
How does the saying go? Idle hands are the devilâs workshop. So are idle minds. Bored students are the kiss of death when it comes to classroom management. If we do not engage students productively and consistently throughout a lesson, they will find ways through which to amuse themselves even if inappropriate.
Write learning objectives where students are consistently asked to stretch and expand their thinking. Then, plan activities, aligned to the learning objective, that will require students to assess, evaluate, synthesize, and create information. Plan activities that move beyond students recalling and reproducing information and place emphasis on student strategic thinking. One lesson planning tool that I always recommend teachers have by their side is the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix for writing/speaking and/or math/science as it combines both the cognitive rigor models of Bloomâs Taxonomy and Webbâs Depth of Knowledge (DOK) construct.
How many of you remember the 1980s movie Ferris Buellerâs Day Off? In that movie, Ferrisâ teacher drones on and on while students sleep, doodle, blow bubble gum bubbles, and even drool. Funny, yes. However, itâs sad to say but some teachers in 2022 still turn their students into hostages during never-ending lectures. Even I, as a teaching coach, sometimes get bored when observing teachers talk incessantly but at least I have the option of leaving and visiting another teacherâs class. Students do not have this option.
Alternate how you teach. Whole class instruction has its merits/roleâparticularly when introducing a topic and conducting a BRIEF mini-lecture on that topicâbut release students to practice learning both independently AND in small peer groups, during each lesson, before regrouping as a whole class during the lesson summary.
Assessment is not just formal paper and pencil tests. While tests are an important indicator of how much students have learned AFTER instruction, teachers can use cold calling, polling (i.e., Kahoot games), and choral response DURING learning to determine if students are learning material or if they must pivot their instruction for better student understanding. These informal assessment strategies can both be fun and produce assessment data.
Also, we educators can do a better job in assessing our students through more authentic assessments such as project-based learning, case studies, and scenarios as well as through student portfolio assessment. So many careers these days require collaboration. So, why then are we still often assessing in isolation?
Above, I mention portfolio assessment as both a great student engagement and assessment strategy. There also are additional less-involved ways through which to engage students in analyzing their academic growth and achievement daily. For example, students can self- and then peer assess essays using a performance rubric. Students can critique their and peer contributions to group work. Students can also shout out positive peer contributions during lesson summary activities. These strategies not only engage students but foster social-emotional competency as well.
I was lucky to be able to enroll in Ms. Firestoneâs ELA/visual and performing arts âhouseâ in a high school that was otherwise dominated by achievement in sports. However, while it is wonderful when districts do provide students with opportunities to learn through cross-disciplinary and theme-based learning approaches, all teachers can engage students through personalization of the learning experience.
Conduct a survey/inventory of student interests. How do you build these interests into your lesson plans? Consider the cultural backgrounds of your students. How might you bring in learning materials and/or teach content through situations with which your students already may have community knowledge? Also, students who are below academic proficiency may become frustrated and disengage while students who are above proficiency may also check out if not provided with an appropriate level of challenge. How do you use common diagnostic assessment at the beginning, middle, and end of the year to determine how many instructional groups you have in your class? What scaffolds and/or extensions might you provide your students so that they do not become frustrated or bored?
If a typical lesson is 45 to 50 minutes, and we are following a gradual release model, this means that we have approximately five minutes for an introductory activity, 10 minutes for a mini-lecture (I and we do), 20 to 25 minutes for student practice (you do), and five to 10 minutes for summation of the lesson. Therefore, our engagement activities need to be concise during a lessonâs introduction, the mini-lecture, and the summation of a lesson and can be extended/deeper process when students are practicing their learning. In other words, donât try to do an inside-outside circle activity during the mini-lecture when a quick turn and talk is more appropriate. Save the inside-outside circle activity for student practice time.
Also, have a ready bank of four to five student discussion strategies that you can swap in and out during student practice time each lesson. However, a word of caution. Donât push back against collaborative learning if you fear the loss of classroom control. It is not the discussion strategy that is faulty but how well the teacher implements it and sets classroom expectations. Students may still need the teacher to instruct them on how to engage in a discussion as well as both discussion stems and guiding questions.
Provide students with SOME choice when it comes to how they will learn content/skills and how they will demonstrate mastery. Allow students who like to move/dance an opportunity to demonstrate their learning through a role play. Perhaps students who like to draw might demonstrate learning through the creation of a poster. Still, others may want to write and/or produce a podcast. Our students are digital natives. Donât fight technology; embrace it. Regardless, make sure students are being evaluated similarly/on meeting the learning objective and not on other extraneous skills used to produce their product.
If you would like additional ideas on how to impact student lives without sacrificing your own, and have a life teaching, check out my quick hack teaching courses, including on student engagement, here. You can also reach me on LinkedIn.
