A joint offering by the College of Engineering and the School of Business
The Engineer in Transition to Management
An intensive, interactive course helping you to develop the skills and knowledge to succeed as a manager
- Informative lectures on management processes
- Classroom exercises to strengthen your skills
- Self-assessment exercises and more!
If you are making the transition from a position of technical responsibility to one of managerial responsibility, this “how-to” course is your opportunity to learn the skills and attitudes you’ll need to manage effectively.
Your career most likely began as a member of an engineering team. On the job, you learned to apply the fundamentals learned in engineering school to specific, real-world design problems. As you became more proficient, you advanced to levels where you began to assume responsibility for group or task management.
Now, as your management responsibility increases, you find that an emphasis on people must replace the emphasis on objects. Decisions you previously made on the basis of factual data must now be made under conditions of uncertainty, and critical technical tasks must be delegated to others.
You come to discover that you must develop new skills and attitudes to manage effectively. That’s why we offer this course: to provide you with the management tools to help you succeed in your new role.
Focus on Managerial Functions, Roles and Skills
This course will increase your awareness of the common pitfalls you’ll face as you move into management and bolster your skills and knowledge for successfully making the transition.
During the course you will:
- Identify the challenges of the transition to management
- Examine the functions and roles of a manager versus a leader
- Identify the skills needed to become a capable manager/leader
- Learn effective management techniques
- Learn how to continue improving your management performance on the job
Throughout the course, your instructor will emphasize the skills required to favorably motivate and supervise others.
How You Will Learn
Your instructor will use a variety of instructional approaches designed to teach you effective management practices:
- Informative lectures on management processes
- Small group classroom exercises in which you will strengthen your skills as you practice management processes with your classmates
- Self-assessment exercises to help you understand how you can become more effective in managing your team
After completing this course, you will return to your job with an action plan of “best practices” to address the new challenges facing you as a manager.
Learn Effective Skills
This course will improve the ways you work with and manage others, increasing both your own productivity and theirs. As an attendee you will:
- Improve your data gathering skills for effective decision making
- Learn effective diagnostic/problem-solving skills
- Improve your process for questioning, when information is lacking
- Learn how to establish a single approach for problem-solving teams
- Improve factual data gathering to replace opinions with facts
- Learn how to identify and prioritize on-the-job issues and concerns for future action
- Learn how to facilitate decision making under time pressure or with limited data
- Learn how to “bullet-proof” your plans through effective risk analysis
- Learn how to anticipate problems and develop preventive action plans
- Learn practical ways to motivate members of your team
- Understand your management style and how it impacts your managerial effectiveness
- Assess your motivating/management style and your interpersonal skills
- Learn how to create a work environment to optimize the performance of your team
- Learn how to resolve the “communications breakdown” problem
- Learn how to conduct effective performance appraisals