Job Hunting

Most of us started our job hunting efforts right at the beginning of this term, starting with updating our resumes, deciding on what jobs to go for an so on.

For me updating my resume was straight forward, the challenging part is deciding on what to do. I know exactly what I want: a job with a company with a strong entrepreneural or intrapreneural culture. A start-up company would have been perfect but most of the start-ups in the Kitchener-Waterloo Area are small software development companies. Almost all are looking software programmers.

For the bigger more established companies finding out which company has a entrepreneural or intrapreneural culture is not an easy task. Still, websites such as Monster.ca, CareerBuilder.ca and Workopolis.com have become indispensible.

Linkedin is also very good, you get to create a profile, describe yourself and get other people to recommend you. I think this is a website to watch.

Top Three Job Search Sites

Job Related social Networking Sites to Watch

Meet the Companies

One company that stands out from the croud when it comes to seeking innovation and having a intrapreneural culture is the Royal Bank of Canada or RBC. Our entire class has interacted with RBC from the beginning to the very end of our program. In the Fall Term we particpated in the RBC Innovation Challenge, we meet RBC again at the Technology Conference in Boston and in July just days before wrapping up our exams we went to RBC in Toronto to work on a real-life business case for them. Other companies - dream list - are shown below.

RBC Group, certainly the most innovative bank in Canada as far as I'm concerned	An entrepreneural engineering company
Large financial services company with excellent growth opportunities	Technology and innovation-focused consulting company
A good financial services company

 

Rounding Up

Part of becoming entrepreneurs is understanding the impact previous entrepreneurs have made in society. We watched biography videos of Bill Gates, Sam Walton, P. T Barnum and the Tucker Corporation and the Smartest Men in the Room - a movie about the Enron scandal. I believe we learned a lot from watching these videos. We had previously watched the movie Start-up.com in the Fall-Term. The reality of being an entrepreneur, the focus, sacrifice and dedication required was pretty obvious.

Our last class was at the end of July, we round off the program the way we started it: with a party. It was a pleasant experience, to think that 12 months had passed so fast.

I'll probably prefer to live and work in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, the atmosphere is calm an inviting.

Career Direction

I believe I now have the skill set to pursue a career either in financial services - which will be new and exciting especially with a company such as the RBC Group - or continue to build a career along the engineering services line. Building Science Engineering looks particularly appealing because it complements my existing skill set, the challenge is to find companies interested in growing their business in this area.

The C3 Group is one such company, the company is definitely exciting, especially as it is located in Waterloo. Before I met the President of the company, I have always believed there are only two types of civil engineering companies: consulting firms and constructing firms. The consulting companies do the design, such as civil electrical, mechanical, etc of structural and other parts of a project. The contracting firms build the building, bridge, dam or what have you. Little did I know the a company like C3 exist that does neither of the two.

When the President of C3 Group spoke to us for the first time, I was extremely skeptical, even cynical, then it dawned on me that for all the materials available for construction today - steel, concrete and speciality materials such as cathodic protection - companies exists in the world that actuall produce these things. Consulting and contracting firms merely apply these materials to specific projects by following engineering guidelines, codes of practice and experienced judgement.

When I used to work at a structural design office I have always wondered how the senior engineer (and the owner of the firm) was able to secure projects for his office. The office had another engineer who did all the design producing calculations, he then passsed on the calculations the the draftman who produced the construction drawings. I was in training similar to a coop in UW at the time so I didn't count. Later I found out that the senior engineer purposedly belonged to some influential 'social' clubs in the city to further his business (trade shows, professional associations aren't very strong in Nigeria). Thus he relied on personal contacts to get projects, it wasn't suprising that almost all his projects were for relatively rich individuals looking to build their own personal houses and such.

In Saudi Arabia the situation no different. Only the big companies like Saudi Aramco (the largest indigenous oil company in the world) and SABIC (the largest integrated petrochemical company in the world) push the cutting edge of engineering and even then they are limited by the expertise available to local consulting and contracting companies (no foreign ownership is allowed of construction companies by law, consulting companies must have a local Saudi partner). This means only tried and tested materials are ever used in major or minor construction projects.

One company that readily comes to my mind is is JKN Keller a German company (now called the Keller Group) that uses vibrofloats, made exclusively by them to compact problematic soils all over the world. If you decide that you want to use vibrofloats to compact your soil, you had to call them, simple as that, no other company had the technology (I have seen a chinese knock-off of a virbrofloat on Alibaba.com though). What a great position to be in especially from a business sense.

Since Canada is a developed country similar to Germany, I guess things are different. Companies like the C3 Group exist and are exciting both from and engineering and personal standpoint. What I don't like about civil engineering consulting firms is the monotony of design, do the same thing day in, day out; in construction, the rigidity of the system that offers little or no flexibility, even if the pay is much better (with experience of course). Business development or client contact? Doesn't exist in either unless you happen have ownership and must keep jobs coming in, more for steady profits than growth.

I Hope I can join the C3 Group, a company that would test the limits of all my skills combined, not just some that I have worked in, in the past or if not locate similar other engineering firms in Canada.

I can take pride in the fact that I have never been refused a civil engineering job officer because I didn't meet the required technical skills of structural design, material characterization/durability issues, etc (I learned about the importance of having technical skills first and foremost before developing business skills to succeed in business, for details see here). My use of this philosophy hasn't changed either before or after the MBET program, in fact in some ways the MBET programs reinforced this belief. But as I grow older, the urge to channel my efforts into a venture/job that utilizes my civil engineering, business, personal and other skills become more and more compelling - this is the only way to ignite my passion. I hope to find the venture/job that will do that.

Others: Manchester United Crowned Champions of Europe

My beloved club (in Europe that is) won the European Champions League Final for the second time in Moscow on May 21, 2008. We did the double over Chelsea FC!