Omar (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Omar project. And today I have a question from Sean from Ireland. That's right Ireland. I do have some listeners all throughout the world. I'm a senior mechanical engineer at university and I'm looking into different fields. I'm not sure what I want to do, but from what I've read on your blog, project management sounds interesting. Could you explain a bit more about it and let me know how I can get a role as a project engineer? Hey, this is a excellent question. Not only because I think you're starting very early, which is excellent. And you are looking into what you want to do, which is great because my senior year at college, I was looking into it, but I was also enjoying myself and probably could have done that a little bit more so great that you're doing that as number one.
Omar (00:49):
And number two, let's get into the actual discussion here, which is what is project management on my blog. If you go to the Omar project.com, you can read about what I, what is project management? And there's definitely, I've, I've written some blog articles about this, which I think do a pretty good job of explaining this. I'll put them in the show notes, but I'll also recap this here for you. Sean project management is essentially the leadership organization of getting things done to achieve certain results. So it's executing the idea phase, the concept phase, the execution, which is constructing it, building it, and then getting it operated. And when you have a lot of brilliant people, a lot of engineers in a room together, you need somebody to lead these things. And typically you have to be somebody who understands the technology behind it. So if you're doing an engineering project, you're going to have to be an engineer to understand how to lead these things, because you will need to know the background, otherwise you won't be effective.
Omar (01:49):
So that's how it plays into engineering, where you might see engineering. There's a lot of different roles in engineering where you could apply this. You have, uh, you have building engineering, so you could be doing skyscrapers. You could be doing commercial buildings, you have software engineers. And guess what? When they're, when they're developing a giant software platform or a new product, they can't all do these things. They have, they might have hundreds of people working on this. At one time, somebody has to lead all the different parts that talk to each other, all the different groups that talk to each other, and typically a project manager, a project lead is somebody that's more senior. They've had the experience of doing it themselves. They understand how to get it done. And they've been promoted into a role of leading teams to get it done. It is a fun part of leadership where you're building and you're continuing to try and create the most value for the product that you're, that you're building.
Omar (02:41):
But you're also trying to make sure your stakeholders are the people that you're building it for are happy. And to me, it's an incredible field because you get to learn so much. It's also feel where you get to learn about people's skills, soft skills of people, management, how to ask for people, to get things done, how to delegate and how to manage and organize all things, to see risks and see how they impact the bottom line, which has cost. It's also a really interesting field because it gets into the cost part. Oftentimes engineers start in their career and they're just doing the engineering. And yet they don't have any understanding of the cost involved or how it impacts costs. In project management, you're often dealing with the cost involved. So you get to understand the commercial side a little bit, and that is very important as you move up and you get into higher levels of leadership.
Omar (03:27):
Sean, I also want to talk to you how you can get a role as a project engineer. Well, a couple of ways, one, you have to understand, and this is common across the board that starting out in your career, it's difficult to jump right into project management only because the better project managers or the project leads are ones that have done it before. So it's like, if I were to ask you, Hey Sean, can you go build a house? And you've never built a house. You probably have a pretty tough time trying to lead a group of electricians, contractors, all these people to build this house, if you've never done it. So that's why most organizations let their project engineers move into that role. As they've already experienced, what is the critical technical roles that they need to understand? Because otherwise it becomes very difficult.
Omar (04:14):
Doesn't mean it's always a case. You could just jump right into one. If there's a need, if there's a gap, it doesn't mean it's not doable. It would be a lot easier for you as a transition, if you've understood it and you've done it before, oftentimes we get asked or I've been asked previously is like, how do I get into it? I want to move into it. And I've been technical. And I'm part of, it's just showing the leadership too. So that's the other side. So definitely focus on understanding the technical aspects first. And then you can always work on leadership. That's something that you don't have to be at work to work on. That is something that I talk about on the Omar project. You can go onto my site, sign up for, uh, the email list and you'll get a free rebranding yourself. And in that I talk so much about how rebranding yourself as a leader is so important, even outside of your work, regardless of the work portion, the, the transition for that has to happen outside of it too. So check that out. I think you'd enjoy it, Sean, thank you for the question. And if you have any questions for me here at the Omar project, send them to podcast@theomarproject.com. You might even be on the show.