Engineer Progress to Management. Career Prospects

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Career prospects as they are.
Distinguishing HRDNI and TNA.
Contradictions about management background.
Ford Motor Company focusing on promoting the staff.
Leadership as a propulsive force for team building.
Conclusions about the issue.

Career perspectives are significant for everyone who searches for good destiny and prosperity along with happiness in life. The world of jobs is full of different suggestions. Some of them have the point about the ‘perspective for the career growth’. There is the question whether there is the transition from technical jobs to management positions. It is known that many graduates begin working from the very little and are often considered as lowly paid staff. The Latin saying follows: “Per aspera ad astra”, so there should be a detailed survey on the problem.

Many successful people inspire by the history and sequential grading of their careers. Somebody started as a waterman and then became the president of a global corporation etc. The examples vary in their diversity of experiences which can be gathered and realized by the next generations of people who try to check their availability to compete for better work positions. According to human reasoning one can say that it is a result of a man’s ambitiousness. As Americans say, “A man’s job position varies within his ambitions”.

The amount of the graduate students who have aspirations to be involved in the management branch do not always possess the notions of the demands which will be put on their shoulders. The top management ladder of a company needs first qualified employees. Ambitions only do not cover the requirements of the employer. So the need to be practiced and trained appeared when transiting from a definite stage in company hierarchy to a higher position.

When organizations need to fill such critical positions as managing the activities of others, why would they appoint people who are not adequately prepared? It is generally accepted that it takes years of schooling and practice to develop professionals in disciplines like science, engineering, finance, and law, but when it comes to the discipline of management people assume that anyone can manage anything without any formal preparation (Gaynor, xi).

With the purpose to follow different criteria of selection while hiring and promoting at work the part of a company known as Human Resources Management sees the importance and dependence of Human Resource Development Needs Identification (HRDNI). This helps in ranging and ranking the staff and acquires a stimulus within the team of workers in order to succeed. According to one of the sources referred:

HRDNI is a process that identifies the gap between what is currently happening and should be occurring. Dalzeil (1994) suggests that a developmental need exists in an organisation when there is a gap between the present KSAs of its employees and the KSAs required or will require for effective performance (HRDNI, 4).

Thus, the policy of such an integrative outlook on the employee selection applies a focused aims of the above mentioned method.

A HRDNI can identify:

An organization’s goals and its effectiveness;
Discrepancies between employees’ skills and the skills required
Discrepancies between current and future skills
Conditions under which the HRD activity will occur (HRD Needs Identification, 8).

People usually ask themselves about how much time it is needed to achieve the desired position and to make main life dreams come true. An ordinary engineer with three-year bachelor is suggested to go the way from this position to a higher, but there is one question: how? In the era of high technologies and multiple devices to simplify a man’s life one can think over the problem whether he has time to move towards the goals or not. It is a matter of experience and specific background.

However, Matthew Stewart opposes such treatment. This management consultant during seven years of working made up his mind about the reasoning of being managed, so that to receive a current position in a company. His conviction falls into the fact that being the principal in one major consulting company consisting of 600 employees he get to the point by saying the following words:

…the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration (The Atlantic Monthly, 2006).

Many companies include in their annual plans the advanced training programs so that to make the reputation of the company as well as the professional level of its personnel higher. The organizations should be aware then of the staff structure and the key ways to support the present requirement to bring up employees. So the two factors are significant: surveillance and investigation.

The theme of leadership is of great concern in structurally strong companies, for this is the main mechanism which provides companies with liability to compete. If, for instance, an engineering manager with great educational background and huge experience base does not fit the required skill range, this one “might sound like just the sort of character who could do with going on an outdoor team building weekend” (Kearns, 53). Training needs analysis is acquired then. This one is called to identify the pros and ons of an employee when doing his job. The following tips should be matched for perfectibility of current and future managers:

In the case of an existing position, ask the people currently performing the role what skills and knowledge they think are needed to do the job effectively.
Talk to someone in a similar position in a different organization to gain another perspective about what is needed.
Consider what impact the role has on your customers (internal and external), and identify what skills and knowledge the position needs to provide the service effectively.
Talk to a trainer – you may know someone in your organization who is a trainer or who has a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. People with training experience will be skilled in specifying what it is that a person actually needs to be able to do to carry out a role effectively (Volunteering Australia, 2007).

With regards to the Ford Motor Corporation Australia it is known that because of the world crisis the company began cutting the staff and providing some changes in its senior branch (Jaguar Worldwide-Monthly, 2009). Looking on the professional skills and habits of workers here appeared a strict competition in terms of selection of better personnel. The thing is in the question: Did the company have such evaluation, experience and knowledge gap before?

During the TNA, the managers with the worse rework/performance scores (see Part 6) would have been highlighted and the designer would be able to see exactly who was having to do the most rework. Whatever s/he designs will therefore be well targeted and aiming to get the best return (Kearns, 52).

Then, here is another question: What are the requirements for the further career growth? As it is accepted, the suggestions and some ideas are directed from individuals. The grading system of sub ordinance is defined to intend the dependents move in a right way. The staff is like an “organism” which exists in a constant state of flux: members of the company are mutually related and connected. In other words, it is a formation of people who devote the larger part (working activity, of course) of their lives to perform the company with positive results. As Ford Australia president Tom Gorman once commented:

“Given the challenges facing us in North America what’s critically important for my team and all of us in Australia is to make sure we deliver on our commitments whether it is quality, profitability, consumer satisfaction. All of those top-line metrics become that much more important for us because, frankly, the margin for error has been diminished significantly” (News-Ford, 2006).

In this case the top managers who try to promote some employees of a lower stage in the company (for example, an ordinary engineer) evaluate them by means of several ways of his or her working analysis. Two features characterize the worker in case of his urge for advance in office. Among them are: job description and job specification.

Job description – contains information about the position.

Job specification – lists the characteristics (KSAs) that the position occupant needs to carry out the duties and successfully achieve the performance indicators (HRDNI, 23).

The development of the relationships between people at work creates a special framework of their mutual influences on one another. That is why team is of great significance for the structures of the company and the challenge which they represent. Team building process is vital, for each member of the corporation play an important role for the performance of it in the main competitors’ arena. Gerard Gaynor proposes to vary within the following constituents of the tem-building means:

Defining “team”

Setting the direction and style

Building the team

Learning from research

Asking the questions and getting the answers

Defining the role of the individual

Using teams effectively

Pursuing excellence

Making diversity work

Motivating the team

Promoting self-managed teams (Gaynor, 75).

The preferable opinion about management development is that whether people deconstruct the notion about the ways of making an effective leader or manager. “If management has the right state of mind, his methods will always lead to the correct result” (The Atlantic Monthly, 2006). Managing itself is an art-like practice preventing people involved from lack of knowledge, experience, business strategies.

The leadership, as it was mentioned above, promotes an employee in a specter of characteristic traits. It is a responsibility which needs more time, efforts and experience, mainly in communication with people. “The entry-level manager is most likely not leading a department that’s looking at the next acquisition or merger or developing the organization’s cost reduction plan, and is probably not involved in high-level organizational decisions” (Gaynor, 143).

First steps for an ambitious person who wants to implement his leadership skills should concern, as many authors write, the issue of maintaining the tactics and inner policy of a company. One ought not to construct something new on this stage. Being, for instance, an engineer one can contribute to the company by realizing current programs of designed work in that branch of activity which he is responsible for. The concept of responsibility is significant and grave at the entry level of the career perspectives. That small amount of people which one can be collaborate with is a large field of providing all those methods and strategies to support a definite department in virtue of self-reliability and self-responsibility as well.

Leadership at the entry level is quite different. You’ll be managing the activities of probably no more than ten or fifteen people so your role as leader must be viewed from that perspective: a small department with specific objectives that require interaction with many other departments. Look at leadership as taking the lead. That implies that your focus is both on today’s work and the future work to fulfill your department’s purposes and maintain its viability (Gaynor, 144).

To make a conclusion, it becomes clear that companies do really need strong working framework to supply the staff with productivity. The results of one’s working activity determine the further steps of the career perspectives. To succeed from one stage of personnel hierarchy to another is the key moment in motivation of the staff. The more employees contribute to a company, the more chances are discovered for them. People negotiate about their future in the company with managers or chief instructors in the human resources department forgetting about the personal impact which is needed to exceed all probable expectations within the topper branch representatives of a company in particular. The only thing is to “positively handle conflict situations in the workplace” (Kearns, 53).

Reference List

Gaynor, GH ‘What Every New Manager Needs to Know: Making a Successful Transition to Management’; AMACOM, 2004.

Stewart, M ‘The Management Myth: Most of Management Theory Is Inane, Writes Our Correspondent, the Founder of a Consulting Firm. If You Want to Succeed in Business, Don’t Get an M.B.A. Study Philosophy Instead’; The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 297. 2006.

‘Do Your volunteers need training?’; Volunteering Australia, 2007. Web.

Kearns, P ‘From Trainer to Learning’, pp. 50-54. Web.

‘Ford Australia under the FoMoCo microscope’. Web.

‘Human Resource Development Needs Identification’. Web.

‘HRD Needs Identification’. Web.

‘Ford Announces Management Team Changes’; Jaguar WorldWide-Monthly, 2009. Web.

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Engineer Progress to Management. Career Prospects

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