Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals

A practical framework for planning your own development, rather than letting it happen by accident. This is the Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) development framework referenced in Technical Career Stages — the same four dimensions apply whether you're comparing a central engineering assignment to a manufacturing one, or just deciding what to work on this year.

The Four Development Dimensions

Dimension	What It Covers
Leadership	Commitment to excellence; owning your work
Business	How work actually gets done; stewardship systems & metrics; industry and company standards; big-picture understanding
Interpersonal	Working in teams; networking; communicating to stakeholders
Technical	Domain expertise in your field

Here's the trap most undergrad engineers fall into: Technical is the dimension the curriculum already develops the most, and it's the one that feels the most obviously "engineering." That makes it tempting to treat it as the whole job and let the other three develop passively, if at all. Technical skill is still important — but it needs to be balanced against the other three, not substituted for them. This is the same idea behind Technical Career Stages' point that the jump from Colleague to Expert is where non-technical responsibilities start to dominate; the earlier you start building the other three dimensions deliberately, the less of a shock that jump is.

I Learned This One the Hard Way

As an undergrad, I was convinced an engineer's job was purely technical, and that how I dealt with people didn't need any real attention. The university reinforced that belief for me: my dean of engineering told our entire incoming class that the 24 credits of humanities and non-technical coursework required for graduation existed because the university's requirements said so — and that if it were up to him, those credits would be technical electives instead.

That belief followed me into my first co-op job. My supervisor's first performance review told me I was abrasive to talk to. I argued with him about it — which, as he pointed out, only proved his point for him. He then told me plainly what I'd need to change if I wanted an offer after graduation.

The lesson didn't fully land. In grad school, interning at a different company, I spent most of my time working alone, away from the team — and didn't get an offer there either. No one had told me that networking with the team mattered as much as the work itself.

It took becoming a first-line supervisor myself (Group Lead, in ExxonMobil's terms) to really see it from the other side: looking back, I wouldn't have hired the co-op version of myself — technically gifted, but a lone wolf who didn't work well with a team. What actually fixed it was ExxonMobil's development-planning process, built around all four LBIT dimensions: a clear statement of what I was accountable for developing in every dimension each cycle, and candid feedback at regular intervals — not just once a year at review time.

The fuller version of this story, including where the lone-wolf habit actually started, is its own page: Teammates or Competitors?.

Where to Build Each Dimension

Good news: you don't need a job to start developing any of these. A lot of what's already available to you as a student maps directly onto one or more dimensions:

Dimension	Example Activities
Leadership	Mentoring or tutoring; leading an undergrad research project; team-lead roles in extracurriculars; outreach volunteering (e.g., Junior Achievement Finance Park, JA-in-a-Day)
Business	Internships and co-ops; researching prospective employers; interview-prep workshops
Interpersonal	Mentoring or tutoring; group projects; team or group extracurricular activities; outreach volunteering
Technical	Mentoring or tutoring; technical electives — though the base curriculum already covers this dimension heavily, so it needs the least deliberate extra effort

Notice mentoring/tutoring shows up in three of the four rows — many activities develop more than one dimension at once. In fact, mentoring is part of the business dimension too: every corporation is multi-generational, and keeping the business running smoothly across generations depends heavily on institutionalizing knowledge and effectively mentoring the next generation before the current experts and sponsors retire. You don't need four separate activities to hit four dimensions; look for the ones that double up, and look at the activities you're already in that could touch more of them with a small adjustment in how you approach them.

Crafting a Balanced Development Plan

A few rules of thumb for turning this into an actual plan rather than a list of good intentions:

Set at least one objective per dimension, each planning cycle (roughly yearly). Four dimensions means four objectives at minimum, not one big Technical goal and nothing else.
Quality over quantity. Cap it at 3-4 items per dimension, even if you can think of more. Too many goals at once tends to mean none of them get done well, and the whole exercise starts to feel overwhelming rather than useful.
Tie every objective to a tangible deliverable that actually requires the competency. Training doesn't stick, and doesn't demonstrate value, without something concrete built on top of it.
- In practice, this often means an Individual Development Plan jointly built by you, your supervisor, and group experts/mentors — with the deliverable showing up in the work group's tactical plan, so both you and your supervisor are accountable for it landing.
Connect development accomplishments to value delivered when it's time for performance discussions. The two are related, but the connection to value isn't always recognized unless you state it.
Find a mentor who's strong in each competency you're developing. You can't teach yourself something you don't know you don't know — this is exactly the blind-spot problem raised in Technical Career Stages.
- Early in your career, that mentor may be assigned by management to onboard and train you. As you move into later stages, it's on you to be proactive — learn who actually knows their stuff and take the initiative to reach out to them.
Discuss your plan with your mentor and supervisor regularly, not just once at the start of the cycle. Their outside view is what surfaces the blind spots your own self-assessment will miss.
- If the tactical plan changes due to change in business priorities, revisit the development plan with them to close any gaps the dropped tactical plan item was contingent on. The fix could be a replacement task that addresses the same development need, or there may be a shift to developing a different need on that LBIT dimension.

See Mentoring Integration with Stage Development for more on finding and working with mentors as your own stage in a career progresses.

The Short Version (LinkedIn Carousel)

The key points of this page in 11 slides — click the image to open the PDF.

Source: "Engineering Career Development and Fostering a Mentoring Culture" (video), keynote address, American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Southwest Student Regional Conference, 2021

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.