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Important Skills to Develop as an Engineer

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Working as an IT engineer provides access to in-demand and lucrative jobs. This provides a foundation for long-term career success.

Continuously developing your skill set helps you take on more senior engineering jobs. This provides additional opportunities for career growth.

Develop These Important Skills To Grow As An Engineer

Communication

Team discussion and collaboration are important parts of an engineering job. Open communication helps you understand the client’s needs, create the product or service, and resolve issues.

Sharing ideas, asking questions, and providing input is essential. Actively listening and sharing constructive feedback also are required.

Using the right form of verbal, written, online, or in-person communication helps you effectively share information. Speaking in non-technical terms when interacting with professionals in other departments is important as well.

Creativity

Dealing with novel situations is part of being an engineer. Innovation is required to develop things that previously did not exist.

There will be times when the typical solution cannot be implemented or does not work. This requires using your knowledge, skills, and experience to resolve the issue.

Critical Thinking

Developing a strong sense of reality and trust in your abilities is essential. Drawing on your knowledge and experience helps you accurately evaluate situations and take appropriate action. Digging deeper for more information helps you make educated decisions and respond appropriately.

Problem-Solving

Working as an engineer involves identifying, analyzing, and solving problems. This is especially important in urgent situations.

Ongoing education and experience help you apply relevant theories and formulas to resolve issues. Learning from your mistakes also is beneficial.

Attention to Detail

Following systems to check your engineering work is essential. This may involve keeping a notebook of the mistakes you made, how you fixed them, and what you learned. You can refer to your notebook as needed to improve your performance.

Leadership

Being a self-starting engineer who wants to lead others as you increase your value to an organization is important. The more skills and experience you gain, the better equipped you are to take on management and leadership roles.

Your ability to motivate your colleagues, assess their strengths, and assign roles helps your team efficiently complete projects. Providing guidance, answering questions, and resolving issues help build team cohesion.

Ready To Grow Your Engineering Career?

Make RightStone part of your engineering career. Visit our job board today.

What Are Common Interview Styles?

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Interview styles differ by the method of asking the questions. For instance, participation in a panel interview may involve being asked behavioral questions to learn more about your work experience.

Some interviewers might choose multiple interview styles. Different styles can gather the information needed to fill different needs.

You can practice answering questions in different interview styles to prepare for the one your potential employer uses. These tips can help.

Learn about the common interview styles and how you can prepare for them.

Open-Ended Interview Style

Open-ended interview questions typically are broad in scope. This means you speak significantly more than the interviewer.

One topic may be how your strengths can help you succeed in the position. Or, the interviewer might ask you to describe how your skills and experiences relate to the role and can benefit your performance.

Emphasize your hard and soft skills in your answers. Include specific examples of how you used these skills in previous roles. Demonstrate that you are well-equipped to carry out the job duties and responsibilities.

Situational Interview Style

Situational interview questions present real-life scenarios and ask how you would approach the situation or solve the problem. This helps the interviewer determine whether you would handle the issue in line with company culture.

Be sure to include specific examples of how you handled similar scenarios in previous positions. This demonstrates how you would handle related situations with your next employer.

Behavioral Interview Style

Behavioral interview questions focus on your thinking, behavior, and outcomes in previous professional, personal, and interpersonal situations. The results of your behavior show what likely would happen under similar circumstances while working at another company.

Behavioral questions may be broad, such as asking how you work while under pressure. Or, they might involve how you would handle a specific situation in the workplace.

Use the STAR method to answer behavioral questions. Explain the situation you encountered, the tasks you performed, the actions you took, and your results. Demonstrate effective communication, leadership, creativity, teamwork, flexibility, organization, and problem-solving in your answer.

Want Additional Interview Prep?

Partner with a recruiter from RightStone for interview coaching and other job search support. Visit our job board today.

Is Your Performance Monitoring Effective?

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Performance monitoring involves regularly verifying and tracking how consistently and productively your digital platforms are performing. This may involve using dashboards and alert systems to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Action may be taken if significant changes in performance occur.

Implement these tips to determine whether your performance monitoring strategy is effective.

Monitor the Data Collection

Make sure your server monitoring platform is scalable. This is essential as your data collection and reporting needs change over time.

Your data collection must have sufficient detail for each metric at the poll interval level. This requires enough storage to hold the data at the poll intervals.

Develop a Baseline

Create a baseline for each server monitoring metric. This lets you set alerts for unusual server or network performance.

Define the Performance Alerts

Performance alerts typically are breaches of a static threshold and baseline deviation. Both require frequent review, especially in the early stages of performance monitoring. Otherwise, normal changes in workloads may create false positive alerts.

Establishing sufficient historical performance statistics for each metric provides more effective predictions of events that may impact service. This results in fewer false positives.

Establish the Report Creation

The server monitoring tools include visual and printed reports showing the performance statistics required for server monitoring. Additional online and paper reports are typically required to help resolve issues.

The visual monitor must be as close as possible to real-time. Also, the data must be properly stored to accommodate increasing workloads. This may involve archiving the data by period or moving it to a distributed database architecture.

Focus on the Data Analysis

Predict which events will impact service and how to troubleshoot them. Also, look for any bottlenecks or potential configuration changes that could benefit the performance of the infrastructure.

Consider using tools that model infrastructure changes. These models help make informed decisions about whether to fix or replace the infrastructure.

Look at the Result Distribution

Share the results of the server monitoring with your IT team. This helps everyone carry out their functions.

Need Help with Your Performance Monitoring?

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Gamification’s Importance in the Modern Workplace

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Some of the most popular apps use gamification as motivation to hold users accountable and reach their goals. This may involve receiving badges for reaching milestones that promote progress.

Social sharing often is combined with badging to provide additional motivation to attain goals. Sharing achievements with others creates a sense of status that supports additional movement toward success.

Gamification can be used to motivate employees in the modern workforce. Combining badging and social sharing elevates employee engagement, performance, and productivity. It also increases job satisfaction, employee morale, and retention rates.

Discover gamification’s importance in the modern workplace and how it can benefit your organization.

Include Gamification in Your Learning Management System

Choose a learning management system (LMS) that combines courses with gamification options and integrates with your other employee experience (EX) technology. Ensure the LMS rewards employees for completing a set number of courses with a time-sensitive component. This may involve a badge or a place on the leaderboard.

Rewarding time-sensitive elements encourages employees to complete courses as soon as possible. It also encourages ongoing learning at work.

Implement Internal Recognition for Learning

Encourage managers to assign training courses with gamification elements connected to them. This encourages employees to complete the courses and further develop their careers.

Internally recognize employees who complete their courses. This may include using your intranet to share employee course accomplishments, scores, and rewards.

Seeing their peers’ accomplishments motivates employees to continue learning. Ongoing learning is important for career development in the modern workplace.

Provide External Recognition for Learning

Implement methods to share badges, course completions, and certificates to employees’ social media accounts as part of the gamification process. It is especially important for employees to share their accomplishments on their LinkedIn profiles for other professionals to see.

Offer rewards for employees who share their recognition on social media. This shows you actively invest in your employees. It also helps attract and retain employees in the modern workforce.

Pair Gamification with Real-World Rewards

Let employees use their badges and leaderboard positions to earn points toward attractive rewards. This may include gift cards, the option to work remotely for a day, or additional vacation days. Providing these rewards encourages employees to complete courses and continue learning. Ongoing employee learning benefits your company’s culture and bottom line.

Integrate Gamification with Performance Reviews

Use technology to include course completion, badges, and other rewards in employees’ performance reviews. This increases course completion and elevates the employee experience. It also promotes learning, career advancement, and loyalty to the organization.

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