Professional Reinvention Is Not an Event but a Culture

The Human Perspective of Career Transitioning on the Threshold of Industry 4.0

It is still curious to me that several times a month I receive requests for career advice from friends, former students, colleagues, clients, and family members, since for me the vocational advising process in high school and the years after was an unmitigated catastrophic experience.

To make a long story short, although I was able to decide in my junior year of high school to follow an engineering preparation path in my senior year, at the queue to pay my inscription fee for college I was paralyzed with the indecision of whether to study medicine, philosophy and literature, mathematics, or civil engineering.

Finally, my passion to see abstract notions converted into tangible useful elements helped me decide on civil engineering studies. But even after completing my undergraduate studies, the uncertainty of having made the right professional decision prevailed.

How NDE Contributed to Shape my Professional Trajectory

As may be the case for many practitioners around the world, my initial contact with NDE arrived as part of the mandatory skills needed to perform my duties as a quality inspector of manufactured components. At the time, I was working part-time (while in college) for a company that produced highly specialized castings and precision-machined components for the sugar, oil and gas, energy generation, and offshore construction industries.

The confluence of science, mathematics, and engineering that is inherent to NDE, combined with the support from two professional mentors and personal role models, allowed me to diversify my proficiency in several methods in a short period of time. I also connected NDE knowledge with supplementary subjects such as material sciences, engineering design principles, manufacturing process, or quality management models that allowed me to solve increasingly complex technical problems.

The solutions I was able to implement generated increasingly valuable results. As a consequence, the scope of my responsibilities within the company grew and diversified to new areas such as prototype development, welding engineering, CNC equipment deployment, and companywide certification efforts. At the same time, I began initial entrepreneurship efforts as a one-man consultancy.

After completing my degree in civil engineering, I migrated to the structural steel fabrication and erection industry. There I found new challenges aligned with my academic formation as a civil engineer as well as the support to become a certified ASNT NDT Level III.

The Challenge of Uncertainty

Every industrial revolution throughout modern history has reshaped not only the production methods and economy, but also has had profound implications in human relations, education, and social behaviors. Companies are currently struggling worldwide to catch up on, understand, and capitalize on Industry 4.0. Indeed, within research and technology institutions there is already talk of Industry 5.0.

Uncertainty derived from change, either disruptive or gradual, is a reality that companies, governments, and societies cope with. This is at the core of their strategic decisions not only in the industries where we participate through our professional activities, but also in the overall external and internal environment of organizations around the world. Uncertainty has a profound impact on the present performance and future of organizations. If not handled properly, this generates anxiety and pessimism, and also hinders growth, improvement, and innovation.

Uncertainty flows from organizations to individuals, including many NDE practitioners, and profoundly affects their professional and personal lives to varying degrees.

Guiding organizations and individuals to not only cope with change but to use it to their advantage has become an important part of my professional activities regardless of whether clients are involved in NDE activities or not.

An important number of players within our industry, including ASNT, are moving ahead in anticipating and crafting a series of initiatives and toolsets that will shape and evolve not only the face of NDE 4.0 but its heart and soul.

In the future, the focus and scope of the role of NDE technicians will be transformed and a supplementary set of skills will be necessary not only to face the challenges inherent to this transformation process, but more importantly, to capitalize on new opportunities.

A Virtual Toolbox for Individuals

With this post I aim to highlight the fundamental value that collaborators provide in the construction of effective solutions to complex situations within an organization. But once in a while, in my profession, I stumble with business executives who still keep a mechanistic perception of human resources as disposable elements within the machinery of productive systems. It is my belief that the numbers that appear on any balance sheet shall be substantially inferior if they don’t include the value that the talent, commitment, and effort collaborators provide to their organizations.

The downloadable handout (Figure 1) lists academic articles and software tools that I regularly share with our clients to guide them in their personal transformation efforts.

Figure 1. Recommended academic articles and software tools.

The NDE Professional in the Industry 4.0 Era

In order to explain to our customers the anticipated evolution of jobs, we classify professional roles in three fundamental categories:

My company is actively involved in the construction of those new roles through a sense of community and structured collaboration efforts within professional global forums.

Although in many countries there is an ever-increasing demand for highly specialized NDE technicians, we are also witnessing the incursion of NDE technologies in consumer products, such as infrared imagining gadgets, that can be attached to personal mobile devices to capitalize on the constantly increasing number of sensors incorporated in them.

This bidirectional tendency of increased specialization and technology democratization requires the realignment and migration of skills into three different spheres, soft, hard, and digital, as represented in the building blocks diagram of Figure 2.

Figure 2. Building blocks diagram of soft/hard/digital supplementary skills for NDT 4.0 with categories proposed by Fidler et al. [1], Trampus et al. [2], Davies et al. [3], and the author.

Using a civil engineering analogy, hard skills are strong but flexible foundations that allow you to build over them any form of structure your imagination and resources allow. During the Industry 4.0 and NDE 4.0 era, we still need to teach and reinforce fundamental skills in categories such as math, physics, chemistry, general engineering, material sciences, specific NDE-related competencies and knowledge, regulatory requirements, experimentation competencies, technology management, and as an added value, innovation management.

In soft skills we consolidate both interpersonal, behavioral and cognitive skills to support professional performance. I considercritical thinking, analysis, and questioning to be fundamental skills for any NDE practitioner, but soft skills also include complex problem solving, active self-learning, teamwork, associational thinking, leadership and social influence, emotional and social intelligence, personal resilience, controlled risk taking, multigenerational and multicultural awareness, and communication supported by professional and personal networking.

Digital skills have a significant impact on both the personal and professional level and synergize with both hard and soft skills to achieve concrete results to solve real-life problems. We subcategorize digital skills in two sets for clarity: basic or fundamental, and advanced or exponential.

Fundamental digital skills include basic competencies such as computational thinking, programming, software and media literacy, virtual collaboration, data analysis, and platform use.

Exponential digital skills include a long list of advanced competencies related to some of the technologies that are needed for Industry 4.0 and NDE 4.0 solutions, such as the Internet of Things, sensors, digital twins, blockchain, virtual and augmented realities, and 3D/4D additive manufacturing. They are categorized as exponential because they are directly related to business models with potential for very accelerated growth.

It is believed that these three sets of skills provide the building blocks and intelligence for an evolutionary or disruptive redefinition of one’s career.

Reflection Inducers as an Alternative for Personal Prescriptions

As I mentioned before, over the years I have received requests for career advice that have ranged from an engineering student doing a six-month internship in our quality department to CEOs and business owners facing professional and personal crises. I was able to guide them all through a personal introspection process derived from experience, so they were able to realize valuable hidden insights to support their decision processes and professional reinvention.

The most frequent reflection inducers that I use are:

  1. Follow your passion: Although an NDE career was not part of my development path while in college, I embraced it because it allowed me to do things that I love such as using science to solve practical problems, teaching, researching, discovering, inventing, innovating, and creating solutions from scratch.
  2. Find your purpose and play with your strengths: Your purpose is located at the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs from you, and what you can be paid to do.
  3. Never stop learning: This is probably one of the simplest and strongest lessons to prevent professional obsolescence. Strive to constantly learn new things and surround yourself with people who also think this way.
  4. Diversify your competencies and roles: This may help you to transition from redundant professional roles to more stable or new ones. It reduces the risks of a forced professional career reinvention after being laid off, demoted, or outsourced. This is also clearly aligned with reflection inducers 8 and 9.
  5. Find mentors: Take your role as mentee with absolute humbleness, respect, a positive attitude, a receptive mind, and an openness to ingenuity.
  6. Map and reinforce your support networks: In my first semester working toward my MBA we were asked to make a diagram of our personal and professional networks. I started the diagram on paper but as it grew in complexity, I transcribed it onto mental mapping software. Several valuable insights came out of this graphical analysis process. I realized that over 97% of our clients came to us by word-of-mouth from previous customers. I was even able to trace the exact path of customers and contacts who recommended us. I also learned that personal and professional networks are not separate worlds, but they overlap when professional contacts become colleagues and endearing personal friends. Hill and Lineback [4],in their book Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, propose that instead of visualizing your contact network as a single unit they suggest creating related but different networks: 1. Your operational network comprises those involved in your group’s daily work. 2. Your strategic network consists of those who help you prepare for the future. 3. Your developmental network includes those who help you grow and provide personal and emotional support when you need it.
  7. Challenge your own status quo: Try new professional roles, volunteering experiences, and other work environments. For example, after refusing for years to publish recurrent articles in a professional social network, I am currently working on a series on LinkedIn about business reinvention and professional growth strategies in the context of Industry 4.0/NDE 4.0. Publishing them has challenged me in many ways but has also allowed me to obtain new skills.
  8. Match your career development plan with your personal and family goals: This is a big one. I am often contacted by friends and customers when they stumble because of great obstacles or even have a personal crisis. In many cases the root cause is this divide or misalignment among their professional, family, and personal selves.
  9. Be always conscious that human passions, skills, and motivations evolve through time: Use this evolution process in your favor to help you diversify your competencies. While I was deciding on undergraduate studies, I despised disciplines such as management, marketing, and finances in favor of engineering. However, due to my entrepreneurial activities, those disciplines became an integral part of my professional role and my graduate studies were focused on management sciences.
  10. Enjoy the experience: Curiosity and a sense of adventure are invaluable assets. NDE provides not only new knowledge, skills, and practical test experience, but also the possibility of creating new and invaluable experiences by meeting new colleagues, communities, companies, and even exploring new locations.

I am firmly convinced that professional (and personal) reinvention is not an event but a lifestyle, it is a constant process of experimenting, failing, learning, and improving. I sincerely hope that some of the ideas in this post provide value to your professional reinvention.

Now, Roll up Your Sleeves

1.   Rate on a scale from 0 to 10 each of the 10 reflection inducers above (0 for “Not applying it at all” and 10 for “It forms an essential element of my development effort.”) and try to answer the following questions:
•     Which are the three with the highest rating?
•     Which are the three with the lowest rating?
•     Which specific actions do I need to include in my daily routine to improve the items with the lowest rating?
•     How can I use the reflection inducers with the highest rating to improve those with the lowest rating?
2.   Use the QR Code provided to download the handout associated with this post, which includes a copy of the Virtual Toolbox for individuals.
•     Choose one of the two articles provided on multigenerational awareness, download and analyze the content.
•     Make a list of at least five of the most important people in your professional network and identify in which generational group they belong.
•     Try to identify for every generational group the preferred communication style and motivators.
•     How should you adapt your collaboration with them in order that both of you obtain the greatest value from your interactions?

References

  1. Fidler, D. and Williams, S., 2016, Future Skills Update and Literature Review, Institute for the Future.
  2. Trampus, P., Krstelj, V. and Nardoni, G., 2019, “NDT integrity engineering–A new discipline,” Procedia Structural Integrity, 17, pp. 262-267.
  3. Davies, A., Fidler, D. and Gorbis, M., 2011, Future Work Skills 2020, Institute of the Future, University of Phoenix Research Institute, 540.
  4. Hill, L.A. and Lineback, K., 2019, Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, Harvard Business Press.

Author Profile

Ramón Salvador Fernández Orozco, is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Fercon Group, Zapopan, Jalisco. Mexico CP 45070,
phone +52 (33) 3129-2560; email ramon@fercon.group.

He is a civil engineer with a degree from the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. He has a dual degree MBA with a specialization in strategic business management from Regis University and technology and innovation management and research processes by ITESO. He is a certified ASNT NDT Level III in RT, UT, MT, PT, VT, and LT.

Since 1986, he has coordinated projects and programs focused on quality improvement, automation, and innovation for manufacturing and construction projects in Mexico, the United States, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, Spain, and Italy. His construction experience covers over 350 000 metric tons of structures for bridges, power generation plants, industrial buildings, commercial buildings, high-rise buildings, and offshore platforms.

He is a senior consultant for Business Acceleration Programs on corporate governance, family protocol, business models, institutionalization, strategy redefinition, and organizational change management processes.

Since 2004, he participates as a volunteer evaluator for state, national, and Iberomerican quality awards and excellence models for private and government organizations in Mexico, Argentina, Spain, and Dominican Republic.

He has published papers on the development of his professional work and lectured at forums in Mexico, the United States, France, Chile, and Brazil.

QR code to access handout for the blog post at the author’s research gate page.