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Hi everyone, welcome to design development brought to you by HO Structural Engineering.
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This is your hub to learn direct from top performers in real estate development, design, and construction.
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I'm your host, Ren Tays, co-founder of HO, lifelong learner, and I'm obsessed with high-powered organizations and the leaders that guide them.
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If this is your first time listening, welcome.
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And if you're a returning listener, I can't thank you enough.
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Let's go.
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Today's episode of Design Development is for young professionals.
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We're going to provide 10 actionable steps to advance your career.
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I'm an abundance mindset person.
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I couldn't advocate for that enough.
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A rising tide raises all ships.
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Big part of the culture at HO, our mission, a better experience.
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One of our core values is embrace growth.
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That means be willing to look at yourself objectively, challenge the way we think, interact, and operate, and share lessons learned so you can help those around you grow.
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Because if we can all help each other improve, we can achieve great things.
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The 10 actionable steps I'm providing today are things that were directly helpful in my career.
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So I'll share some of my experience and some stories along the way.
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I'll start by sharing questions I had early in my career.
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How do I advance my career?
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Is there a career roadmap?
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What is my earning potential?
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How much value do I create?
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How would I ever know how much value I create?
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Can I achieve my life goals on my current career path?
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How long will it take?
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That one, not so much a clear question in year one, but as I got a few years into my career, that became a really critical question to ask myself.
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And I question, I would challenge you to make sure that you do that frequently.
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When these questions I just shared are left unanswered, we can end up with a feeling of being stuck, or it leads to burnout.
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One thing that I think is misdiagnosed often.
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Here are two statements that are a good sign that you might be burnt out or feeling stuck.
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You feel that you should be paid more for your current actions, behaviors, and results that you're doing.
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That, to me, is an outward thought.
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You're blaming others, you're resenting others.
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It's outside of your control.
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I'm doing what I should be doing, and I should be compensated more.
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I should get that promotion, right?
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You're you're placing the blame elsewhere instead of looking internal.
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We are not sure what actions would change our current situation.
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This is another one of feeling stuck, right?
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I didn't get the promotion.
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I didn't get the raise I wanted.
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I've been doing everything I thought would deliver that raise.
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Like I want to change, but I don't know what to do next, right?
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That's a that's a tough feeling.
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We feel stuck in that situation.
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The conversation today is about breaking through those hurdles, identifying where you are today, kind of a diagnosis of where you are today, and finding the steps to take a step forward.
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Let's get to it.
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Number one, the four stages of contribution.
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There are four stages of contribution.
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They are dependent, independent, through others, and strategically.
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When you enter your career, you fresh out of college, you enter your career, you are fully dependent on others to do your job.
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You don't know how you tie your shoe as far as business runs, right?
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I don't care how good you did in school.
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You are dependent on others to do your job.
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And your goal to move forward is to identify what skills am I best at, what skills or tasks are necessary to come to contribute to this team, and how can I develop the ability to do those tasks independently as soon as possible.
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And then your goal throughout your career is to continue to stack new skills that you can do independently.
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So your goal, master your daily habit and move as many skills and tasks as you can from dependent to independently.
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Actional step number two, you need to view yourself as a business of one.
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If you're an employee, think of yourself as your own business.
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Your colleagues, although you're on a team, can also be kind of like a competitor.
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And your manager or your boss is your sole client.
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So your entire business is on helping your manager or your boss become successful.
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What does that mean?
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That means that if you have a task or something, this again going back to trying to do things independently, recognize that doing something 80% to completion doesn't save anyone time.
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I know in my experience, I was running estimating for my family steel business, estimating steel construction, and a junior estimating position would be responsible for doing takeoffs and trying to capture the full scope of work of a project so that we could go through and itemize and make sure the price we assigned to those tasks and that quantity or that scope was accurate.
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And if they would miss scope, I would have to spend more than 50% of the time doing due diligence to make sure that we got there, right?
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So 80% complete didn't help me because I once you find something that was missed or wrong, you have to go back to figure out and make sure that it's complete because at the end of the day, your manager is accountable to the job that gets done correct.
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So view yourself as a business of one.
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Ask yourself, how can I deliver this task or this product or this service to 100% completion as if they didn't exist and I couldn't rely on them for answers?
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Brings me to number three.
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Never ask a question without developing two possible solutions.
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Sometimes we're feeling pressure, maybe we didn't manage our time well, maybe we have a deadline coming up.
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And it can be pretty enticing to just go to somebody more experienced than us to ask them how to solve a problem.
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Hey, how do you design a sear wall?
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Hey, how do you design this floor beam?
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What would you do in this situation?
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And it's great for achieving a short-term result, but if you just simply ask how to do stuff or ask for answers to your colleagues, it's robbing yourself of a learning opportunity.
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So what I'd challenge you to do instead is ask yourself again, if I didn't have anybody, other resources, what are two possible solutions that could create this outcome?
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And why I say two is now you get to look at the pros and cons of each solution to identify which one you think is better than the other.
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What's option A?
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What's option B?
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Now you go to your manager or a colleague with more experience, your boss, and you deliver, hey, I have this question, I'm trying to solve this problem.
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Here are two ways I thought about solving it.
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What do you think?
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Now, whether you were right or wrong is not important, but you went through the exercise so that when you do get to the right answer with your colleague, you are gonna retain the answer.
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Your probability of retaining that answer and coming away with the lesson and understanding why the answer is the way it is is significantly higher.
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You're gonna grow from that.
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And when you do that time after time, year after year, decade after decade, those lessons create a gap that's really hard to compete with if somebody doesn't have that same habit.
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Actionable step number four.
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It's your responsibility to get all the information you need to do your job.
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What does that mean?
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Let's say you're given a task, you need to understand how is that the results of that task going to be used going forward?
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How does it impact the next step?
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What happens if you if it weren't complete correctly, right?
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Understand the magnitude and the value of that task that you're completing.
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Understand when your manager or your client needs that task to be completed.
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And here's the last missing piece that I think gets overlooked a lot in a manager-managee relationship is about how long should it take to get this done?
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About how long should it take to get that task done.
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What you don't want is a manager to hand you a task that they think should only take four hours and you don't quite understand what you're supposed to do or to the level of quality, and you spend four days trying to do it.
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They said it was due Friday.
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You got it done Friday, but you spent four days instead of four hours.
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Like if it takes, if something's taking way way longer than it should, it just tells you that you don't quite understand and it tells you you have to ask more questions.
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So that that creates the the boundaries to success.
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It's the the the bumpers on the bone lane.
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Actionable step number five, you don't owe anyone an answer on the spot.
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A huge mistake for for inexperienced professionals is when a client asks an answer, let's say for an architect, and we're talking exterior wall sections, and today is energy code.
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We need to design multifamily buildings to passive house standards.
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So a client might ask you, how does the exterior wall section change and how much more does it cost?
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What you don't want to do is fumble through that answer on the spot if you don't know exactly what it is, because guess what?
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Everybody else in the room totally can pick up on that you don't know exactly what you're doing.
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So instead of that, you could say something like, Hey, we can put together a comparison of the two wall sections for you by the end of the week, and we'll work with the contractor to make sure we understand what the cost difference is over the course of this building.
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Does that work for you?
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Concise, gets them the answer, tells your client when you're gonna get the answer, a much better solution, and raises your status rather than fumble through an answer that you're not quite sure of.
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Actionable step number six.
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Never say I need to ask my manager.
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We'll use that same example on the exterior wall section.
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You do not want to deflect responsibility to be like, I'm not really sure what changed from the old wall section to the new one.
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I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna ask Doug when I get back to the office and I'll let you know.
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All you did right there is deflect accountability to say that Doug's the one that knows what to do, not me.
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So now you're telling your client that Doug's the guy he needs to talk to to get answers and that you've just lowered your status, right?
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So if you do that time after time after time, you're constantly deflecting accountability, you're never gonna get more responsibility than you have today.
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So even if you go back and ask Doug to help you with the answer, you do not need to tell the client that that's what you're doing.
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You just need to tell them when you're gonna get the answer that they need and make sure that they understand what you you make sure you understand what your client needs when they ask.
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Number seven's a big one.
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You are responsible for your future.
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Remember that conversation at the beginning of the episode?
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If you feel stuck, you didn't get a promotion, it's easy to fall to a victim mentality.
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What you want to do is take full accountability accountability for your future.
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Let's take that the getting a promotion for an example.
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It is very possible, and I think more common than most people realize, that the reason you're not getting promotion or a raise is because your company is not actually making that much money.
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And if that's the case, there's not much to share.
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There's not much to go around.
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So you might be doing things well, you might be doing your job well, but if the company isn't succeeding, it's going to be really hard for you to succeed and continue to advance your career.
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You need to be working for a company that is also growing and delivering value and is a successful company to find a future career there.
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So in that case, it's easy to blame said company, but at the end of the day, if you're accountable for your future, you can recognize, have the hard conversations with your current company and also talk to other people in the industry to see what other opportunities are out there.
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Actionable step number eight.
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Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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A super clean example to drive this message home is you would never get in the car and just drive without a destination.
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Be a huge waste of time, right?
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Yet most people navigate their career without an idea of where they want to end up in their career in three years, in five years, in ten years.
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It's not something they've ever really defined.
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They're just doing what's in front of them, which means that you're advancing your career on your manager or your company's priorities, not your priorities.
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Powerful stuff.
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Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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Actionable step number nine, you got to recognize how important and how impactful the compound effect is.
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The compound effect, little habits add up to have a big result over time.
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That's whether it's a positive habit or a negative habit.
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Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10.
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So if you have, if you think long term, you set goals out there a year, three years, five years, 10 years, you'd be surprised at the compound effect of just small daily habits that inch towards those goals when executed consistently, the the results can be tremendous.
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Last but not least, actionable step number 10.
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Don't expect a company to invest in you if you aren't willing to invest in yourself.
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What does that mean?
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Let's say you're a good engineer and you want to get into client relations and business development and maybe have uh your own book of work.
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It's like, have you taken initiative to invest in reading books on sales, relationship building, negotiating, or anything like that?
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Because if the answer is no, why would a company invest in your development if you're not willing to invest in your own skill development?
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Pretty tough question, right?
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So going back to number nine with the compound effect, if you want to be in business development, you want to be in sales, you want to be in marketing, you want to be an executive, you better be investing some of your personal time reading books, talking to people, listening to podcasts like this that allow you to develop skills, increase your awareness, and improve your judgment over time.
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And I promise you, if you're the type of person that's doing that, your company is going to be that much more excited to invest in you.
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I know as a business owner myself, I would love to invest behind people than invest in themselves.
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There you have it.
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10 actionable steps to advance your career.
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These lessons have served me well in my career, and I know that they will serve you well if you put them to practice.
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If you're in college, you're a young professional, please share these with your peers.
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It's certainly a part of how we operate at HO and a part of the ethos here on design development, but sharing lessons learned is a way that we can all each other help each other grow.
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So please do that for your fellow peers.
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One thing before I let you leave, Shrenick, or uh, he's a member of HO and has been instrumental in launching design development, wouldn't be where we are today without him.
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And when he heard of today's topic, he had one other question is what if you don't know what you want to do in your career?
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Right?
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How do you advance your career if you don't know what you want to do in the future?
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And it's a great question, and I'll provide some clarity here.
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You do want to at least figure out a plan for this year, say two or three year window.
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If you're working towards something today, you should be able to think about like where might I want to take this in the next one to three years.
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And what that does is it gives you an objective that you can work towards, right?
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Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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So if you come up with some sort of objective out one to three years, you can build a plan to hit that.
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Three things I want you to consider.
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What is important to your company today and what do they want you to be able to do?
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What's something that you want to be able to do, and what's a skill that you want to develop yourself?
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And if you can look at those three things, those are something that you can build an objective around in that one to three year window and something that you can work towards.
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And something I'll share that I've come to learn in business is businesses are 80% the same, 20% unique.
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So 20% is that subject matter expertise that's selling widgets, that's engineering, that's architecture, that's construction, that's carpentry, that's being a mechanic, a dentist.
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The other 80% of the business is very similar.
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What does that tell you?
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That means in that short-term window that we're talking about, that one to three years, I mean that's a blip on the radar in terms of your whole career.
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And the reality is, is if you're building complementary skills to your subject matter expertise, those skills are gonna be transferable to other industries.
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So don't worry if you don't know that you're in the right industry or not.
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You just need to set these goals that aren't that get you out of the day-to-day.
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So if you think a year to three years out, it's gonna get you out of the day-to-day, the week to week, the month to month.
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Frustration.
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It's easy to get bogged down in the details and you pick your head above water and look out far enough so that you can build a plan and start working towards something.
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When you're working towards something, is when you start to gain better awareness, you gain better context, your judgment improves, and you're gonna gain new perspectives and you're gonna see new opportunities and you're gonna start to pivot.
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And I guarantee that those things will help you compound because you're building good habits and they're gonna compound into a successful career.
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You're gonna figure it out along the way.
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Thank you for joining Divine Development.
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If you are a structural engineer and you are looking for a new opportunity, I encourage you to take a look at what HO has to offer.
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We're very intentional about creating that better experience for our team.
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We create an environment to learn.
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We want to align success.
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HO University, it's something, it's our training and development program.
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We're not only teaching people how to be engineers, we're trying to teach them how a business works, how a business creates value.
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We have financial literacy training, we have open book financial management, and we're really proud of the culture and the team that we have, and we're building a national company.
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So if that sounds interesting to you, please don't hesitate.
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Send me a message today, we'll get on the phone and we'll connect.
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Thank you for tuning into design development.
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Take care.
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Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into design development.
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Real quick before you leave, our goal is to help as many people as possible.
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We're a growing community and you're a big part of it.
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So just click that send button.
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Send this episode to a friend to let them get those same insights that you got today.
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We appreciate you.
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See you next time.
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Hi everyone, welcome to design development brought to you by HO Structural Engineering.
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This is your hub to learn direct from top performers in real estate development, design, and construction.
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I'm your host, Ren Tays, co-founder of HO, lifelong learner, and I'm obsessed with high-powered organizations and the leaders that guide them.
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If this is your first time listening, welcome.
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And if you're a returning listener, I can't thank you enough.
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Let's go.
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Today's episode of Design Development is for young professionals.
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We're going to provide 10 actionable steps to advance your career.
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I'm an abundance mindset person.
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I couldn't advocate for that enough.
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A rising tide raises all ships.
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Big part of the culture at HO, our mission, a better experience.
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One of our core values is embrace growth.
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That means be willing to look at yourself objectively, challenge the way we think, interact, and operate, and share lessons learned so you can help those around you grow.
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Because if we can all help each other improve, we can achieve great things.
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The 10 actionable steps I'm providing today are things that were directly helpful in my career.
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So I'll share some of my experience and some stories along the way.
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I'll start by sharing questions I had early in my career.
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How do I advance my career?
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Is there a career roadmap?
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What is my earning potential?
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How much value do I create?
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How would I ever know how much value I create?
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Can I achieve my life goals on my current career path?
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How long will it take?
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That one, not so much a clear question in year one, but as I got a few years into my career, that became a really critical question to ask myself.
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And I question, I would challenge you to make sure that you do that frequently.
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When these questions I just shared are left unanswered, we can end up with a feeling of being stuck, or it leads to burnout.
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One thing that I think is misdiagnosed often.
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Here are two statements that are a good sign that you might be burnt out or feeling stuck.
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You feel that you should be paid more for your current actions, behaviors, and results that you're doing.
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That, to me, is an outward thought.
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You're blaming others, you're resenting others.
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It's outside of your control.
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I'm doing what I should be doing, and I should be compensated more.
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I should get that promotion, right?
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You're you're placing the blame elsewhere instead of looking internal.
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We are not sure what actions would change our current situation.
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This is another one of feeling stuck, right?
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I didn't get the promotion.
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I didn't get the raise I wanted.
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I've been doing everything I thought would deliver that raise.
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Like I want to change, but I don't know what to do next, right?
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That's a that's a tough feeling.
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We feel stuck in that situation.
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The conversation today is about breaking through those hurdles, identifying where you are today, kind of a diagnosis of where you are today, and finding the steps to take a step forward.
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Let's get to it.
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Number one, the four stages of contribution.
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There are four stages of contribution.
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They are dependent, independent, through others, and strategically.
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When you enter your career, you fresh out of college, you enter your career, you are fully dependent on others to do your job.
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You don't know how you tie your shoe as far as business runs, right?
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I don't care how good you did in school.
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You are dependent on others to do your job.
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And your goal to move forward is to identify what skills am I best at, what skills or tasks are necessary to come to contribute to this team, and how can I develop the ability to do those tasks independently as soon as possible.
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And then your goal throughout your career is to continue to stack new skills that you can do independently.
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So your goal, master your daily habit and move as many skills and tasks as you can from dependent to independently.
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Actional step number two, you need to view yourself as a business of one.
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If you're an employee, think of yourself as your own business.
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Your colleagues, although you're on a team, can also be kind of like a competitor.
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And your manager or your boss is your sole client.
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So your entire business is on helping your manager or your boss become successful.
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What does that mean?
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That means that if you have a task or something, this again going back to trying to do things independently, recognize that doing something 80% to completion doesn't save anyone time.
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I know in my experience, I was running estimating for my family steel business, estimating steel construction, and a junior estimating position would be responsible for doing takeoffs and trying to capture the full scope of work of a project so that we could go through and itemize and make sure the price we assigned to those tasks and that quantity or that scope was accurate.
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And if they would miss scope, I would have to spend more than 50% of the time doing due diligence to make sure that we got there, right?
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So 80% complete didn't help me because I once you find something that was missed or wrong, you have to go back to figure out and make sure that it's complete because at the end of the day, your manager is accountable to the job that gets done correct.
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So view yourself as a business of one.
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Ask yourself, how can I deliver this task or this product or this service to 100% completion as if they didn't exist and I couldn't rely on them for answers?
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Brings me to number three.
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Never ask a question without developing two possible solutions.
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Sometimes we're feeling pressure, maybe we didn't manage our time well, maybe we have a deadline coming up.
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And it can be pretty enticing to just go to somebody more experienced than us to ask them how to solve a problem.
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Hey, how do you design a sear wall?
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Hey, how do you design this floor beam?
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What would you do in this situation?
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And it's great for achieving a short-term result, but if you just simply ask how to do stuff or ask for answers to your colleagues, it's robbing yourself of a learning opportunity.
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So what I'd challenge you to do instead is ask yourself again, if I didn't have anybody, other resources, what are two possible solutions that could create this outcome?
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And why I say two is now you get to look at the pros and cons of each solution to identify which one you think is better than the other.
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What's option A?
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What's option B?
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Now you go to your manager or a colleague with more experience, your boss, and you deliver, hey, I have this question, I'm trying to solve this problem.
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Here are two ways I thought about solving it.
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What do you think?
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Now, whether you were right or wrong is not important, but you went through the exercise so that when you do get to the right answer with your colleague, you are gonna retain the answer.
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Your probability of retaining that answer and coming away with the lesson and understanding why the answer is the way it is is significantly higher.
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You're gonna grow from that.
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And when you do that time after time, year after year, decade after decade, those lessons create a gap that's really hard to compete with if somebody doesn't have that same habit.
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Actionable step number four.
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It's your responsibility to get all the information you need to do your job.
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What does that mean?
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Let's say you're given a task, you need to understand how is that the results of that task going to be used going forward?
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How does it impact the next step?
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What happens if you if it weren't complete correctly, right?
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Understand the magnitude and the value of that task that you're completing.
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Understand when your manager or your client needs that task to be completed.
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And here's the last missing piece that I think gets overlooked a lot in a manager-managee relationship is about how long should it take to get this done?
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About how long should it take to get that task done.
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What you don't want is a manager to hand you a task that they think should only take four hours and you don't quite understand what you're supposed to do or to the level of quality, and you spend four days trying to do it.
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They said it was due Friday.
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You got it done Friday, but you spent four days instead of four hours.
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Like if it takes, if something's taking way way longer than it should, it just tells you that you don't quite understand and it tells you you have to ask more questions.
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So that that creates the the boundaries to success.
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It's the the the bumpers on the bone lane.
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Actionable step number five, you don't owe anyone an answer on the spot.
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A huge mistake for for inexperienced professionals is when a client asks an answer, let's say for an architect, and we're talking exterior wall sections, and today is energy code.
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We need to design multifamily buildings to passive house standards.
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So a client might ask you, how does the exterior wall section change and how much more does it cost?
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What you don't want to do is fumble through that answer on the spot if you don't know exactly what it is, because guess what?
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Everybody else in the room totally can pick up on that you don't know exactly what you're doing.
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So instead of that, you could say something like, Hey, we can put together a comparison of the two wall sections for you by the end of the week, and we'll work with the contractor to make sure we understand what the cost difference is over the course of this building.
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Does that work for you?
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Concise, gets them the answer, tells your client when you're gonna get the answer, a much better solution, and raises your status rather than fumble through an answer that you're not quite sure of.
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Actionable step number six.
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Never say I need to ask my manager.
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We'll use that same example on the exterior wall section.
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You do not want to deflect responsibility to be like, I'm not really sure what changed from the old wall section to the new one.
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I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna ask Doug when I get back to the office and I'll let you know.
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All you did right there is deflect accountability to say that Doug's the one that knows what to do, not me.
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So now you're telling your client that Doug's the guy he needs to talk to to get answers and that you've just lowered your status, right?
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So if you do that time after time after time, you're constantly deflecting accountability, you're never gonna get more responsibility than you have today.
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So even if you go back and ask Doug to help you with the answer, you do not need to tell the client that that's what you're doing.
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You just need to tell them when you're gonna get the answer that they need and make sure that they understand what you you make sure you understand what your client needs when they ask.
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Number seven's a big one.
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You are responsible for your future.
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Remember that conversation at the beginning of the episode?
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If you feel stuck, you didn't get a promotion, it's easy to fall to a victim mentality.
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What you want to do is take full accountability accountability for your future.
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Let's take that the getting a promotion for an example.
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It is very possible, and I think more common than most people realize, that the reason you're not getting promotion or a raise is because your company is not actually making that much money.
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And if that's the case, there's not much to share.
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There's not much to go around.
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So you might be doing things well, you might be doing your job well, but if the company isn't succeeding, it's going to be really hard for you to succeed and continue to advance your career.
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You need to be working for a company that is also growing and delivering value and is a successful company to find a future career there.
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So in that case, it's easy to blame said company, but at the end of the day, if you're accountable for your future, you can recognize, have the hard conversations with your current company and also talk to other people in the industry to see what other opportunities are out there.
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Actionable step number eight.
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Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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A super clean example to drive this message home is you would never get in the car and just drive without a destination.
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Be a huge waste of time, right?
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Yet most people navigate their career without an idea of where they want to end up in their career in three years, in five years, in ten years.
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It's not something they've ever really defined.
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They're just doing what's in front of them, which means that you're advancing your career on your manager or your company's priorities, not your priorities.
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Powerful stuff.
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Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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Actionable step number nine, you got to recognize how important and how impactful the compound effect is.
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The compound effect, little habits add up to have a big result over time.
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That's whether it's a positive habit or a negative habit.
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Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10.
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So if you have, if you think long term, you set goals out there a year, three years, five years, 10 years, you'd be surprised at the compound effect of just small daily habits that inch towards those goals when executed consistently, the the results can be tremendous.
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Last but not least, actionable step number 10.
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Don't expect a company to invest in you if you aren't willing to invest in yourself.
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What does that mean?
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Let's say you're a good engineer and you want to get into client relations and business development and maybe have uh your own book of work.
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It's like, have you taken initiative to invest in reading books on sales, relationship building, negotiating, or anything like that?
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Because if the answer is no, why would a company invest in your development if you're not willing to invest in your own skill development?
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Pretty tough question, right?
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So going back to number nine with the compound effect, if you want to be in business development, you want to be in sales, you want to be in marketing, you want to be an executive, you better be investing some of your personal time reading books, talking to people, listening to podcasts like this that allow you to develop skills, increase your awareness, and improve your judgment over time.
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And I promise you, if you're the type of person that's doing that, your company is going to be that much more excited to invest in you.
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I know as a business owner myself, I would love to invest behind people than invest in themselves.
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There you have it.
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10 actionable steps to advance your career.
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These lessons have served me well in my career, and I know that they will serve you well if you put them to practice.
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If you're in college, you're a young professional, please share these with your peers.
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It's certainly a part of how we operate at HO and a part of the ethos here on design development, but sharing lessons learned is a way that we can all each other help each other grow.
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So please do that for your fellow peers.
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One thing before I let you leave, Shrenick, or uh, he's a member of HO and has been instrumental in launching design development, wouldn't be where we are today without him.
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And when he heard of today's topic, he had one other question is what if you don't know what you want to do in your career?
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Right?
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How do you advance your career if you don't know what you want to do in the future?
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And it's a great question, and I'll provide some clarity here.
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You do want to at least figure out a plan for this year, say two or three year window.
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If you're working towards something today, you should be able to think about like where might I want to take this in the next one to three years.
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And what that does is it gives you an objective that you can work towards, right?
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Failing to plan is planning to fail.
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So if you come up with some sort of objective out one to three years, you can build a plan to hit that.
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Three things I want you to consider.
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What is important to your company today and what do they want you to be able to do?
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What's something that you want to be able to do, and what's a skill that you want to develop yourself?
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And if you can look at those three things, those are something that you can build an objective around in that one to three year window and something that you can work towards.
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And something I'll share that I've come to learn in business is businesses are 80% the same, 20% unique.
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So 20% is that subject matter expertise that's selling widgets, that's engineering, that's architecture, that's construction, that's carpentry, that's being a mechanic, a dentist.
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The other 80% of the business is very similar.
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What does that tell you?
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That means in that short-term window that we're talking about, that one to three years, I mean that's a blip on the radar in terms of your whole career.
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And the reality is, is if you're building complementary skills to your subject matter expertise, those skills are gonna be transferable to other industries.
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So don't worry if you don't know that you're in the right industry or not.
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You just need to set these goals that aren't that get you out of the day-to-day.
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So if you think a year to three years out, it's gonna get you out of the day-to-day, the week to week, the month to month.
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Frustration.
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It's easy to get bogged down in the details and you pick your head above water and look out far enough so that you can build a plan and start working towards something.
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When you're working towards something, is when you start to gain better awareness, you gain better context, your judgment improves, and you're gonna gain new perspectives and you're gonna see new opportunities and you're gonna start to pivot.
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And I guarantee that those things will help you compound because you're building good habits and they're gonna compound into a successful career.
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You're gonna figure it out along the way.
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Thank you for joining Divine Development.
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If you are a structural engineer and you are looking for a new opportunity, I encourage you to take a look at what HO has to offer.
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We're very intentional about creating that better experience for our team.
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We create an environment to learn.
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We want to align success.
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HO University, it's something, it's our training and development program.
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We're not only teaching people how to be engineers, we're trying to teach them how a business works, how a business creates value.
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We have financial literacy training, we have open book financial management, and we're really proud of the culture and the team that we have, and we're building a national company.
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So if that sounds interesting to you, please don't hesitate.
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Send me a message today, we'll get on the phone and we'll connect.
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Thank you for tuning into design development.
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Take care.
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Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into design development.
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Real quick before you leave, our goal is to help as many people as possible.
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We're a growing community and you're a big part of it.
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So just click that send button.
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Send this episode to a friend to let them get those same insights that you got today.
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We appreciate you.
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See you next time.
