Transitioning from Management to Engineering Ida Hashemi, Yun Tian

Transcription

1 Transitioning from Management to Engineering Ida Hashemi, Yun Tian Computer Science Department, California State University, Fullerton Ya-fei Jia College of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China ABSTRACT In modern society, people look forward to achieving higher goals in their professional lives. Most people want to become managers and lead a group of individuals. Among these people, there are some who are not willing to transition back to engineering even when they have to. There are many reasons why these people do not like to go back, including higher salaries associated with management positions. This project studied the reasons, gives some suggestions for those who have to go through the transition, and discusses ways to make the transition more appealing. By conducting a survey, we gathered some preliminary data from three countries and achieved some beneficial results. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY Nowadays, people are looking for better opportunities for upward mobility in their careers, such as promotions to management [1][2][3][4][5]. On the other hand, there are people who do not want to become managers and are happy with their current positions as engineers. People would like to become managers, but it is rare to see a manager willing to go back to Percentage of the people willing to go back to engineering SYSTEM MODELING AND RESULTS o This category has three subcategories as 1. Managers point of view (refer to Figure 1): most managers, about 59%, are not willing to go back to engineering 2. Engineers point of view (refer to Figure 2): most engineers, about 65%, are willing to go back to engineering once they become managers. Some of these engineers have already done the transition before and they are willing to do the same when they become managers again. 3. Both groups point of view (refer to Figure 3): in general, around half of people (52%) are willing to do the transition. Figure 1: Managers Point Of View Figure 2: Engineers Point Of View Figure 3: Both Group Point Of View Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition o This category is grouped into three subcategories. 1. Personal reasons (refer to Figure 4): such as skill loss, age, salary, psychological issues and management prestige. From figure 4, we can see that skill loss and salary are the main personal reasons people are not willing to do the transition back to 2. Society Environment influence (refer to Figure 5): such as society issues, company environment and not enough educational resources. We can conclude that company environment has the most influence (62%) on managers and engineers on this issue. 3. Job Characteristics (refer to Figure 6): such as repetitive functionality of engineering work, competitive job market, not challenging enough functionality of engineering and limitations of engineering work. The collected data shows that about 57% of people are willing to go back if companies consider some changes in the tasks that managers have to perform after transition, such as arranging the engineering work for people with management experience specially so their management experience and systematic problem solving skills could be well used. CONCLUSIONS Based on the preliminary analysis in previous section, from the 98 surveys we collected in three countries, we summarize some discoveries as follows: Managers have some personal reasons not to do the transition such as the lower salary for engineering, becoming older, and losing some technical skills. These reasons are different according to culture and social nuances of different countries. Company environment also has influence on managers who want to go through the transition. Some managers are afraid of being judged negatively for their decision to make the transition back to Another major reason why managers will not do the transition is that the tasks for engineers are repetitive and managers who have done the transition find these tasks are not challenging enough and interesting. Many managers are willing to make the transition if they can use their managerial skills in some ways, and do some creative engineering work in their new position rather than doing repetitive like entry level engineers. Some suggestions: In order to restore people s technical skills, companies and universities can offer some essential and quick courses for managers who want to go back to Companies can consider giving managers who have made this transition more room and authority in their job duties, and consider applying changes in their daily tasks to make them more interesting and challenging. Also companies can provide a wide range of tasks in different departments for managers who are now engineers again. Thus the engineers with management experience may choose the department and series of tasks that best fit their interests. The questions that we wanted to study in this project are as follows. o Why is it rare for managers to go back to engineering? o What are the reasons other than salary or skill loss? o What conditions would make the transition more appealing? o Is there any special training needed for managers to go back to engineering? o How can universities help engineers and managers in this situation? The goal of this study is to make it easier for engineers and managers with an engineering background to do the transition, and make them be able to go back and forth between management and Figure 4: Personal Reasons Figure 5: Environment Influence Figure 6: Job Characteristics Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition in different countries o The purpose of this analysis was to find out different reasons on this issue in different countries. The data was collected from three different countries: China, Iran and USA. 1. Personal reasons (refer to Figure 7): Figure 7 shows that Chinese people are most concerned about age (35%), American people are most concerned about skill loss (50%) and above 37% of Iranian people are concerned on all of the personal reasons in the survey. 2. Environment influence (refer to Figure 8): We can see from Figure 8 that American people are only concerned about educational resources, Iranian people are mostly concerned about society issues and Chinese people are only concerned about company environment. 3. Job characteristics (refer to Figure 9): this means Chinese people are only concerned about engineering limitations, American people are concerned about engineering limitations and its repetitive nature by 22% and 18% respectively, and Iranian people are mostly concerned about competitive market and challenging nature of the tasks. FUTURE WORK In future, we would like to do some further studies on this topic: Identify skill sets in different fields that managers need to do the transition. Provide some suggestions in different fields to universities that can help managers restore their lost skills. Suggest some ways of dividing tasks for managers and entry level engineers to companies. Also we want to see if this problem is only for computer and engineering fields or it is common among other fields as well. Do the same/similar survey in Patient Care field of study. Do some comparison on the feedbacks between other fields and In order to answer the questions mentioned above, data was collected and analyzed. The procedure of this study is as below: Design a survey and interview people. o Create an online survey. o Ask different managers and engineers to fill out the survey. Categorize the results from interviews. Analyze the categorized data. Figure 7: Personal Reasons Figure 8: Environment Influence Figure 9: Job Characteristics Conditions to make the transition more appealing o These conditions include providing Equal Salary to managers as an engineer, Acceptance Among Other Engineers not as a failure but as a person who made a choice, and Omitting Repetitive Works from engineers` tasks (refer to Figure 10). The analysis results show that about 50% of people believe that if the assigned tasks for the engineers with management experience are slightly different than the tasks for entry level engineers, are less repetitive, and involve more research type tasks, it would be more appealing for people to do the transition. REFERENCES 1. Transition: engineer to manager: specialist to generalist, By D. D. Hood, IEEE Website 2. Engineer to manager managing the transition, By Arshad TK Online, 3. Training engineers to be managers: a transition tension model, By J. L. Hall, J. M. Munson and B. Z. Posner, IEEE Website 4. Making a transition from technical professional to By T. Tarim, IEEE Website 5. Exploring career stages of midcareer and older engineers when managerial transition matters, By Q. J. Yeh, IEEE Website Figure 10: Conditions ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We want to thank California State University, Fullerton to give us this opportunity to do research around this topic.

2 Transitioning from Management to Engineering Ida Hashemi, Yun Tian Computer Science Department California State University, Fullerton, USA Ya-fei Jia College of Computer Science Beijing University of Technology Beijing , China ABSTRACT People look forward to achieving higher goals in their professional lives. In order to do so, most people believe becoming a manager is the solution. On the other hand, there are people who must go back to engineering because of some situations. Other than these situations, it is rare to see a manager willingly to go back. There are many reasons why people do not want to do this transition. This project is to discuss these reasons, to find a solution and make the transition more appealing. We conducted a survey, gathered some preliminary data and achieved some beneficial results. Keywords: Management; Engineering; Transition; Personal Reasons; Job Characteristics; Environment Influence; Conditions; 1. INTRODUCTION In modern society, people are looking for better opportunities in life such as getting promotions and becoming managers. Some people will take courses in MBA or DBA in order to make them better qualified for the management position. Others will try to be a better engineer to be promoted to the management position. On the other hand, there are people who do not want to become managers and they are happy with what they have now as an engineer. For this project, we want to see opinions of both groups on the matter. Also it is worth mentioning that the term manager we are using in this project includes project leader, project manager, program manager, chief technical officer and board of director, and the term engineer includes junior engineer, software engineer and senior software engineer. This is based on organizational hierarchy in engineering fields as show in Figure 1. These studies mostly talk about the definition of management and engineering, their special skills, skills needed to become a manager, organizational hierarchy in engineering organizations, the reason why people want to become a manager rather than being an engineer and how can one engineer become a manager [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. We provided a list of some related definitions below: Manager: manager is a person who directs a group of people in order to achieve a goal. This person should deal with workers, give motivation and even give promotion. In general, this person is dealing with non-technical issues [5]. Engineer: is a principle for designing or developing a process, structure or equipment, to solve a problem [3]. Managers` skills: management has twelve skills as Leadership, Shaping the environment, Communication, Listening and Motivating, Provide a vision, Understand the Employee, Uncertainty Removal, Trust Staff, Help Others to Improve, Getting the Work Done, Find Common Ground and Integrity [1][2]. Engineers` skills: engineering has ten skills as Technical Skills, Communication Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Problem Solving Skills, Organizational Skills, Fast Learner, Team Player, Work Independently, Innovative and Open To Changes [4]. Organizational hierarchy: as shown in Figure 1, organizational hierarchy from top to bottom includes board of director, chief technical officer, program manager, project manager, project leader, senior software engineer, software engineer and junior engineer [11]. 2. RELATED STUDIES AND MOTIVATION In computer science fields, there are people who are transitioning between engineering and Quality Assurance back and forth, and some other people who do the transition to management. To understand the concept of this transition and find the requirements for this act, there are different studies on transitioning from engineering to management.

3 Ask managers and engineers for their opinion on transitioning back to Figure 1: Organizational Hierarchy It is interesting that all previous studies are around transitioning to management or between quality assurance and There are no studies on transitioning from management back to engineering, although the demand and situation of transition from a manager to an engineer exist. These observations motivate us to do the study on this topic. 3. PROBLEM STATEMENT We see people who would like to become a manager or have already became one. But we have never seen a person willing to become an engineer when he/she has already became a manager. There are some special cases in which you can find a manager who has gone back to However, that could be because that manager has lost his job or been laid off, and in order to make a living he/she had to go back to Except such cases, there are very few managers who had done the transition to Some even cannot do so because they do not have engineering background. The questions that we want to study in this project are as follows: Why is it rare for managers to go back to engineering? What are the reasons other than salary or skill loss? What conditions would make the transition more appealing? Is there any special training needed for managers to go back to engineering? How can universities help engineers and managers in this situation? The goal of this study is to make it easier for engineers and managers with engineering background to do the transition and make them be able to go back and forth between management and From this study, we want to help engineers who want to become a manager someday know what should they do to keep their skills and be up-to-date when they are working as managers. This study is also helpful for the engineers who want to become managers someday to be prepared for management work without spending a few years on studying management related courses. The objectives to achieve aforementioned goals include: Find out the difficulties that managers are facing in order to go back to Come up with some solutions and suggestions. It is of significance that managers could know that it is possible for them to do the transition back to It would be better if there is a road to management from engineering in which you can turn back whenever you wanted to. There are some barriers and limitations to collect data. It is impossible to talk to every single manager to get his answers. Therefore, it has been decided to make some online surveys by collecting opinions from some managers and engineers who would like to provide their feedbacks on this issue. In addition, although this problem is common all over the world, it was hard to contact people all around the world in the preliminary study. Thus some limited countries were chosen for the first stage s study. These countries are USA, Iran and China. 4. METHODOLOGY Data that is need for this study is about why managers would not go back to engineering and in what conditions they would be willing to do so. In order to collect the information, it has been planned to interview managers with different backgrounds. Below is the list of some of these questions that we asked in the survey. Have you ever wanted to go back to engineering? What barriers do you perceive for people who want to do the transition? If there would be a possibility of changing situation of engineering to become more appealing, what would be your condition? It is important to know why managers do not intend to go back to engineering all these years and it is important to see if the percentage of managers willing to do the transition to engineering is worth these efforts or not. To collect the related data for the above questions, it is decided to interview two groups of people. Managers: It is important to talk to these people because they have been in both positions and know the most of both areas. Thus, their idea about the transition is more important than the other groups of people. Engineers: they vary in engineers who have never been a manager and engineers who have done the transition before. It is decided to create an online survey. After some searching, Survey Monkey has been chosen as a tool for this study. In order to find out the different aspects of this issue, the survey results are categorized as four groups, the willingness to do the transition, Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition, and the conditions in which the transition would be more appealing. Based on the survey results we received, some analysis and comparison on the answers to the different questions are presented in the next section.

4 5. RESULTS After reviewing all answers, results are categorized in four different categories: Percentage of the people willing to go back to engineering, Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition, Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition by different countries, and Conditions to make the transition more appealing Percentage of the people willing to go back to engineering This category has three subcategories as Managers` point of view: most managers, about 59%, are not willing to go back to Figure 5: Personal Reasons Environment influence: such as society issues, company environment and not enough educational resources. We can conclude that company environment has the most influence (62%) on managers and engineers on this issue. Figure 2: Managers` Willingness Engineers point of view: most engineers, about 65%, are willing to go back to engineering once they become managers. Some of these engineers have already done the transition before and they are willing to do the same when they become managers again. Figure 3: Engineers` Willingness Both groups point of view: in general, around half of people (52%), are willing to do the transition. Figure 6: Environment Influence Job characteristics: such as Repetitive Functionality of Engineering Work, Competitive Job Market, Not Challenging Enough Functionality of Engineering and Limitation of Engineering Work. The collected data shows that about 57% of people are willing to go back if companies consider some changes in the tasks that managers have to perform after transition such as arranging the engineering work for people with management experience especially so their management experience and systematic problem solving skills could be well used. Figure 4: Both Group`s Willingness 5.2. Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition This category has three subcategories as: Personal reasons: such as skill loss, age, salary, psychological issues and management prestige. From figure 4, we can see that skill loss and salary are the main personal reasons people are not willing to do the transition back to Figure 7: Job Characteristics

5 5.3. Reasons why people are not willing to do the transition by different countries The purpose of this analysis is to find out different reasons on this issue in different countries. The data is collected from three different countries: China, Iran and USA Personal reasons (refer to Figure 7): Figure 7 shows that Chinese people are mostly concerned about age by 35%, American people are mostly concerned about skill loss by 50% and above 37% Iranian people are concerned on all of the personal reasons in the survey. Figure 8: Personal Reasons Different Countries Environment influence (refer to Figure 8): We can see from Figure 8 that American people are only concerned about educational resources, Iranian people are mostly concerned about society issues and Chinese people are only concerned about company environment. Figure 10: Job Characteristics Different Countries 5.4. Conditions to make the transition more appealing These conditions include having Equal Salary to managers as an engineer, Acceptance among Other Engineers not as a failure but as a person who had made a choice and Omitting Repetitive Works from engineers` tasks (refer to Figure 10). The analysis result shows that about 50% of people believe that if the assigned tasks for managers, who have done the transition, would be slightly different than the tasks for entry level engineers and be less repetitive, and be more researching type, it would be more appealing for people to do the transition. Figure 9: Environment Influence Different Countries Job characteristics (refer to Figure 9): this means Chinese people are only concerned about engineering limitations, American people are concerned about engineering limitation and its repetitive nature by 22% and 18% and Iranian people are mostly concerned about competitive market and challenging nature of the tasks. 6. CONCLUSION Figure 11: Conditions Based on the preliminary analysis in previous section, from the 98 surveys we collected in three countries, based on the preliminary analysis in previous section, we summarize some discoveries from this study as follows. Managers have some personal reasons not to do the transition such as the lower salary of engineering, becoming older and losing some technical skills. These reasons are different according to culture and social nuances of different countries. Company environment also has influence on managers who want to go through the transition. Some managers are afraid

6 of being judged negatively for their decision to make the transition back to Another major reason why managers will not do the transition is that the tasks for engineers are repetitive and managers who have done the transition find these tasks are not challenging enough and interesting. Most managers are willing to make the transition if they can use their managerial skills in some ways, and do some creative engineering work in their new position rather than doing repetitive like entry-level engineers. Based on the preliminary study and analysis, the following corresponding suggestions are proposed: In order to restore people s technical skills, companies and universities can offer some essential and quick courses for managers who want to go back to Companies can consider giving managers who have made this transition more room and authority in their job duties, and consider applying changes in their daily tasks to make them more interesting and challenging. Also companies can provide a wide range of tasks in different departments for managers who are now engineers again. Thus the engineers with management experience may choose the department and series of tasks that best fit their interests. 7. FUTURE WORK In future, we would like to do further studies on this topic: Identify skills sets in different fields that managers need to do the transition. Provide some suggestions in different fields to universities that can help managers restore their lost skills. Suggest some ways of dividing tasks for managers and entrylevel engineers to companies. With these further studies we can consider which skills need more attention when managers want to do the transition. Also we would be able to help managers more specifically in the field that they need help. For example, by further studying in other fields like Patient Care we could further understand that whether this problem is common in other fields or just in engineering field. After the further studies are completed, if the observation and analysis results are similar among quite a few fields, we plan to investigate the common reasons behind and explore corresponding solutions or suggestions to individuals, organizations and society to facilitate the transition. REFERENCES [1] Management Skills, Partner`s Report Publication, LexisNexis Academic, 1999 [2] L. Rivenbark, Management Skills, HRMagazine, 2005 [3] K. A. Smith and J. G. Truxal, The Definition of Engineering: Continuing Misunderstandings, JSTOR Arts and Science VI, 1986 [4] F. Ahmed, Software Requirements Engineer: An Empirical Study about Non-Technical Skills, Journal of Software, 2012 [5] J. F. Reh, Manager, About.com Guide [6] D. D. Hood, Transition: engineer to manager: specialist to generalist, IEEE Website [7] J. L. Hall, J. M. Munson and B. Z. Posner, training engineers to be managers: a transition tension model, IEEE Website [8] T. Tarim, making a transition from technical professional to IEEE Website, 2012 [9] Q. J. Yeh, Exploring career stages of midcareer and older engineers when managerial transition matter, IEEE Website, 2008 [10] Arshad, Engineer to manager managing the transition, Arshad TK Online, 2011, [11] Organizational Hierarchy, software testing and quality assurance, 2012, In addition, the further studies will also help universities to make decisions on the corresponding skill trainings and courses for those managers who want to catch up with the new technologies in order to fulfill the transition back to engineers. Also we want to see if this problem is only for computer and engineering fields or it is common among other fields as well. Currently we have some general plans as follows. Do the same/similar survey in Patient Care field of study. Do some comparison on the feedbacks between other fields and The first purpose of these studies is to better understand the corresponding situation among organizations of the other fields, not just computer and software engineering companies. Secondly, the corresponding solutions to help solve the related barriers or provide support might be explored and proposed by the similar data collection and analysis process.