How do we become the best engineer we can? Is it simply talent or is it something that can be learned?

According to the book "Talent Is Overated: What Really separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else" by Geoff Colvin, the key is deliberate practice. Research has shown that for all world class performers in areas as diverse as music (performing and composing), golf, chess, football, comedy, acting and artistic painting, the key has simply been practice. But not just any kind of practice: it is something called deliberate practice. Deliberate practice has the following key features:

• It's designed to specifically improve performance: It needs to be an activity that is outside of our comfort zone and focused on areas that have been identified as needing improvement. For example, Tiger Woods would drop a ball in sand trap and then step on them to practice that very specific and difficult shot until he mastered it.
• It can be repeated a lot: To really develop the skill associated with the practice, the practice must be repeated until it is mastered.
• Feedback on results is continuously available: Without feedback we do not know if we have improved or if we reacted in the best way we could. For example, chess players will review chess games played by masters. At each stage, they will think what they would do and then compare their decision with what the chess masters did. If you are faced with a situation where you need to interpret the validity of your results (how well you played a piece of music, went in an interview or made a decision about which machine tool should be purchased), then you need feedback from someone who is objective: someone, like a mentor or manager.
• It is highly demanding mentally: The practice requires concentration because you are actually focusing on making an improvement. For example, if you want to improve your tennis, you don't just hit the ball again and again for an hour or so. You need to analyse each shot to see what needs to be improved. With such concentration you can only last for 1 to 1.5 hours.
• It isn't much fun: We need to do something we are not good at over and over again, with focused concentration and feedback on what we're not doing right so that we can then focus on that. At first this might be depressing, but it does mean that if you are prepared to go down the hard path, then it is unlikely that many will follow you and this will distinguish you all the more.

So if we now adopt this idea that to be great we need to engage in deliberate practice, then questions arise about how we would apply this to ourselves as engineers:

• How do we identify the skills that we need to work on; what are the skills that engineers especially need?
• How do we determine type of practice that we need to engage in; can it be a part of work or de we need to do this outside of work?
• Who can/should we ask for feedback; can it be someone we work with or do we need to look elsewhere; do they need to be another engineer?

These questions were put to a number of engineers who showed that they were active in the engineering community and qualified to consider these questions. The following posts are their responses.

If you have opinions on this, then please add your comments. If you have strong opinions, and can write an entire post on them, then contact us and we'll look at putting your post up.

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