engineers doing development, what?

One of the questions I wanted to answer this summer was: what kind of useful skills does my engineering education equip me with for working in development? Does it at all?

So far, I think it does (at least a little bit). From working with KITE I've realized just how important it is for organizations to take a systematic and professional approach in the development projects they implement. In a way, this summer has given me just as much work experience as any other engineering job would in terms of working in a professional environment. More importantly, I've found that some of the things I've learned in engineering have been very useful during the summer.


Project management. Development projects are...well...exactly that, projects! When I asked one of my co-workers at KITE how he got involved in development he said that what he really had been interested in was project management. In various ocassions this summer, I've had to sit down with my team of interns and staff at KITE to discuss objectives, deliverables and deadlines. Because there are goals to achieve, stakeholders to be accountable to, and limited resources, I think that it is very important for development workers to know about how to deal with the ups and downs of projects.


Processes and Systems. One of the most important thing that all engineers develop, I think, is a deep love for analysing processes and systems. Although we may not recongnize it as such, we learn a lot about how to analyze causes and effects, relationships, and ways of making a system effective. These are useful when trying to understand how development projects work and how to make it work better. For example, our team has been working on "tools" that KITE can use to improve the processes they have in place to implement the eCARE project especially the selection of entrepreneurs and future locations of the RBCs. These tools are there to make the decision making and documentation a lot easier. Projects cannot be efficient if there is no adequate way of monitoring and monitoring cannot happen without establishing a process!


Communication. Proposals, reports, forms, presentations...you name it! Development work is full of written and oral communication! I know that engineers are not known for their grammar, but we do learn a certain approach to communication that is short, simple and to the point. So far I've found that although development talk has a lot of human faces attached to it, there are lots of objective pieces of information that need to be transferred. Being able to communicate them objectively and in a structed way can mean the difference between a project partner reading your proposal for funding or not.

Technology. There are many examples of how technology and development go hand in hand: water and sanitation, infrastructure, agricultural production, ICT's, etc. Yesterday, one of the project managers at KITE encouraged me and the other interns to look for career opportunities in the energy sector not because of the cool enginnering related to it but because of it's importance in development. Although the knowledeg of the technology alone is not enough, some knowledge is necessary to be an effective development worker in those areas of work. For instance, if I had more knowledge on renewable energy technologies I would have been more useful to KITE in trying to recommend what to do with the RE component of eCARE.


No fear of numbers. That is the one thing all engineers have in common. Believe it or not I've spent my last few weeks in Ghana trying to understand the correlations between financial data, making charts in Excel, dealing with statistics, and making rough calculations. Good ideas are better with good numbers.

Stubborness. Im pretty sure this is not officially included in any engineering curriculum! In KITE I've been impressed by the work ethics of everyone in the office. I think that going through the engineering curriculum has made me learn the same respect for hard work and excellence.

Problem solving. Of course, how can we forget everyone's favourite! Needless to say, there are a ton of challenges out there to be solved waiting for people to look at them from different angles. Maybe they don't come in the shape of equations, but they do come with variables and assumptions! (sorry, I couldn't help adding the nerdy comment...)

In less than three weeks I'll be back in school learning more about structures and math. That's ok because as long as I don't forget the people for whom I want to work for, there are no useless skills to learn.