Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an engineering director and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
An Engineering Director is responsible for directing and supervising a team of engineers as they develop, test, adjust and create solutions to technical difficulties.
The main responsibilities for this position include directing and coordinating production, operations, quality assurance, testing or maintaining in industrial plants, overseeing the research an development of new products and procedures, hiring, training and mentoring other engineers and supporting staff, writing performance reviews and solving internal issues, discussing and laying out project specifications, making detailed plans to accomplish goals, analyzing market demand and available resources, reviewing, approving, modifying product designs, preparing budgets, bids and contracts, negotiating research contracts, approving expenditures, reviewing and recommending contracts, developing cost estimates, draft proposals and reports for clients.
Core Skills Required to be an Engineering Director
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
An engineering director should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Inspiring others:
Inspiring is encouraging one to be their best in contributing to the vision of an organization where they are placed and entrusted to work.
An Engineering Director must create a culture where the staff can use their professional prowess and aspire to be the best by giving them a clear vision and purpose through decisive leadership that motivates and inspires them.
Team Building:
Team Building represents various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within the different teams at the workplace.
An Engineering Director ought to provide team building activities to his team to cultivate better communication, morale, motivation, productivity and help employees know each other better as well as their strengths and weaknesses to be used in building a better workplace.
Developing Others:
Developing others is an unremitting process that focuses on the broader, longer-term growth of individuals to nurture them to their potential and promote future development.
An Engineering Director needs to support, coach, positively impacts and effectively aid in developing talents of their staff by motivating them to become outstanding in their behavioral change and performance improvement that opens up development opportunities in the organization.
Cooperation with colleagues:
Cooperation is the process of working with groups or teams for a common mutual benefit as opposed to working in competition or for selfish ambition.
An Engineering Director should learn the art of creating a mutually beneficial exchange among the employees that dwells much on cooperation for the same mutual benefit with adequate resources for all to use rather than creating a spirit of competition.
Dependability:
Dependability is the characteristic of being able to be counted on and relied upon by providing services that be trusted within a period.
An Engineering Director needs to be dependable and hire reliable employees who can be counted on as consistent and beneficial to the business, building their niche as an essential element of the larger team without worrying about bringing less than your efforts.
Handling Stress:
Handling Stress is the skill to balance the requirements of the job and your abilities or available resources in performing it.
An Engineering Director needs to creatively learn how to schedule work according to the abilities of different individuals to ensure a balance that will not put an unsustainable level of pressure on the employees and cause them to accumulate work related stress.
Results Orientation:
Results Orientation is knowing and focusing on outstanding results and working hard to achieve them because they are significant.
An Engineering Director must understand and make it clear to the employees how important results are and the competitive and results driven market that the company is facing while encouraging them to remain focused on the results that every project bears without fail.
Goal and Objective Setting:
Goal and Objective Setting is the strategic plan that is set and laid down identifying how goals should be accomplished, by who and by what time.
An Engineering Director must detect and schedule each employee's goals, strategy, and objectives and keep motivating them to ensure all of them are met within the set time bringing growth to both the company and the employee.
Diversity Awareness:
Diversity Awareness is the understanding that people are different and unique in their particular way and respecting their uniqueness.
An Engineering Director ought to successfully identify the various types of diversity presented in his company to be able to benefit from these individual differences in the hope of improving the success of his team and encourage the team members to become aware of these qualities and use them appropriately.
Training others:
Training is the ability to expand the knowledge base by learning new truths that are useful in the workplace.
An Engineering Director needs to creatively schedule training for his employees in a focused manner that will allow the employee stay useful in the workplace and get new knowledge so that both the business and the worker not suffer from delays and work related stress.
Hard Skills Required to be an Engineering Director
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
An engineering director should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.