Challenges and Change at Work
I feel a bit of a fraud about this post. The recent changes in my career are due primarily to my choices rather than to COVID-19. My name is Jean Boudreau and I am President of Engineers Canada. To run for president is the choice I made that has created the most change in my professional life this year. The other choice I made with my husband – to do renovations to our house since we would not be travelling this year. This is what my office looked life for a month – the office I was supposed to be using for my paying job and my volunteer job.
I am a civil engineer, licensed to practice in New Brunswick. I graduated from the University of New Brunswick in 1983. Change started for me while I was still at university. When I enrolled for my first year, graduates had multiple job offers to choose from. By the time I graduated, very few of us had even one job offer. The market for engineers had changed that quickly.
My first job was a contract position with the New Brunswick Department of Transportation in the Planning Branch. Eventually, it became a permanent full-time position and I was then able to move to an area that I had hoped to work in while I was a student. I transferred to the Construction Branch and was one of the first female engineers to work as a Resident Engineer.
As a junior engineer with limited experience and no seniority, I was a “floater”. That meant I was assigned to one of the 12 districts within the province for the construction season and I was assigned to any branch that needed help in the winter. It was an excellent way to learn the various functions of the department and I gained experience in construction, design and traffic as well as the experience I had from Planning Branch. All that experience helped me when I switched from public service to consulting work.
I have been working as a consulting engineer for over 30 years now, the last 26 have been with GEMTEC Consulting Engineers and Scientists. It was a small New Brunswick firm offering geotechnical, hydrotechnical and materials engineering services. I was hired to add geometric design capabilities to the company that was already providing the geotechnical and pavement design aspects for roads and highways. The company has expanded in size, spread to 5 provinces and added other areas of expertise since I joined it.
Working as a consultant means your work load is one of two things: so much work you’re not sure how to get it all done, or not enough work and you are scrambling to find more to keep employed. It rarely seems to be just exactly right. And as a senior staff member you are expected to be working (chargeable work!) and also finding work to keep yourself busy and hopefully many other busy too.
As a design engineer, a typical day for me is in my office working primarily on a computer. When I started working in highway design, a lot of the work was done by hand, plotting on graph paper, using plastic curves to draw horizontal and vertical alignments and doing calculations with a pencil, eraser and calculator. Now it’s AutoCAD and spreadsheets. It also includes visiting job sites, meetings with clients and owners and working with multi-disciplinary teams and sometimes multiple companies when working on large projects. As a senior engineer and principal, I also meet with clients and actively look for opportunities to promote the company and all the services we can provide, not just the services within my expertise.
But as I said at the beginning, the biggest change for me this year was actually planned a few months before COVID-19 caused the shut downs and the switch to most of us working from home. When I was elected to be the next president of Engineers Canada, I knew it would be a challenge to juggle full time consultant work and the responsibilities of being president. At the time, I was expecting to be doing a lot of travel for Engineers Canada. I chose to switch my paying job to part-time work. This was also going to be my way of working towards retirement. My final day of full-time work was 1 day after the province declared a state of emergency.
I was expecting the change to retirement to be a challenge for me. I thought easing out of my technical work while staying busy with my volunteer work would help me adapt to removing something that has been such a large part of my life for the last 35 years. And I think I was right. I have been doing a little more consulting than I had planned on doing. Some of that is due to delays in projects because of COVID-19 but not all of it. I have been very busy with Engineers Canada work even without the travel. I still participate in meetings – committees, boards, regulators’, consultations and conferences – but I do it all from home on my computer.
Challenges and change are part of the job in engineering. They are definitely part of the technical side of the job – learning new skills to expand your expertise, adapting to new technologies, learning to do things in different ways. They are also part of the decisions we make along the way – switching companies or career paths; moving to other cities, provinces, or countries; changes in life situations such as a moving because of your partner or starting a family. And they are not always easy decisions or positive experiences. More than once I wondered if I were making the right decision and there were definitely rough patches and bends in the road that you couldn’t see around. But I can honestly say that I don’t regret any of the choices I made, starting with the decision to study civil engineering when the guidance counsellor told me I should take business. And the renovations are finally done in our home and that was a good decision too!
If you have any questions feel free to ask me in the comments!