Blogging: the new career boost
A couple days ago, a headline in my IEEE Job Site newsletter caught my attention: How a Personal Blog Can Boost Your Career. (Being a blogger, things like that do catch my eye.) The article mentioned several ways in which a blog can help you, a couple of which I believe are more relevant for engineers than others. Let’s start with where I disagree with the post. I am not sure that I buy into the whole “personal brand” idea, but I also take issue with one of the final comments: that your blog probably isn’t going to replace your resume. The first is a matter of opinion, and in engineering, I’m going to guess that more manager-types are going to be interested in results and not your marketing je nes sais quoi. (I could very well be wrong on this, however, which is why I’m an engineer and not…
Why don’t engineers write?
As you may have noticed, we have a new addition to our writing staff at Engineer Blogs. Miss MSE joined us as a guest contributor. What you might not have noticed is, with Miss MSE’s arrival and Paul Clarke’s departure, Engineer Blogs’ active writing staff is now 2/3 women. I’m a bit surprised by that given the usual ratio of men to women in engineering. I have a few theories why, aside from the obvious one that the male writers keep leaving. However, one underlying issue that is likely related is that engineers just don’t seem to like to write. This one puzzles me. Is it because engineering is a male-dominated field, and young boys are given the message early in life that they are bad writers? Does this make them not want to try? Or is it that they really ARE bad writers and realize the effort is futile?…