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Upcoming Workshops
New Workshop Coming Soon!

Career Management for Engineers
Based on Business War Games


Through the War Game process, the team engineers try out their career management strategies in a risk free environment that includes the benefits of learning how others are working the new variables to their advantages.

The collapse of the global economy in Fall 2008 changed the world of work for engineers forever. The new book by Greg Hutchins, titled “Working It”, describes the hard lessons learned and the new opportunities inherent in the paradigm shifted reality of outsourcing, contract labor, and the movement of importance to the developing world.

Just because the lessons are hard does not mean, however, that engineers should expect less from their work lives, and this workshop will jump start the process of defining new alignments for engineers in the new reality. This workshop is based on the strategy evaluation and creation model used in Business War Games.

In a Business War Game, people are formed into teams to role-play product strategists in competitor companies. The teams each research their companies' market strategies, technology and product road maps, product life cycle histories, etc. and prepare for presentation strategies they believe will beat those of their fellow competitors. At the appointed time, all the competitor teams gather, along with a “jury” team, to make their strategy presentations. After each competitor presentation, all participants are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters. At the end of the presentations, the “jury” team passes judgment on which team had the most persuasive strategy, the most forward looking strategy, or the most realistic strategy. Then all the competitor teams take what they've learned, from each other and from the “jury”, regroup to formulate strategy that's better yet, and the cycle starts again. The strategize-presentation-discussion-judgment cycles continue until some constraint is satisfied (like t ime runs out) or no new strategies are being formulated.

The power of the War Game process is that strategy can be created and evaluated against real competitors in a safe environment with very little outlay of resources. For this Career Management Workshop, research from “Working It” about the new paradigm shifted work world takes the place of the market and product research done by the competitor teams in a classic Business War Game. The competitor teams are organized around common engineer career situations. The goal for each team is to work together to formulate a strategy that makes their engineer more successful in the new reality than those of their competitors. Summaries of the findings from “Working It” are provided to all team members as “market” background, along with detailed descriptions of common engineer career situations, derived from personal interviews with current professional engineers.

For more information, please contact Susan Federici.


 


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