A-1 · threadactive

Career path / skill tree

2 hypotheses

hypotheses

§01open

There is a finite set of skills relative to Engineering Careers

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Engineer Skill Map

A taxonomy of the discrete skills that make up an engineering career, grouped into five trees — Craft, Architecture, Teamwork, Leadership, Professionalism. If the list is enumerable and finite, career growth stops being an open-ended ladder and becomes a mapping problem: which nodes you already hold, which are missing, and which are worth acquiring next.

§02open

Engineering Career growth is a skill tree, not a ladder

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observations

Engineers bring different skills to the team

There is a large but finite set of skills an individual can have that are relevant to their engineering career.
Individuals, based on their history, personality, and interest, will naturally gravitate towards practicing their own personal set of skills.
Career growth can be modeled as the venn-diagram overlap of the skills an individual is good at, enjoys, and that bring value to the company.

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Ideal Career — Overlap Model

The intersection of what you enjoy doing and what you're actually good at marks the highest-leverage zone for career decisions.