About

How’s it going?

My name is Rob and I’m an engineering manager and Professional Engineer. Over the past several years I’ve hired, trained, and mentored countless engineers.

Throughout these experiences, I’ve learned that I have a natural ability to lead and teach others, and just truly enjoy helping people develop themselves to the best potential possible.

Just like many others, I started at the bottom in my career, but over time I built something great by relying on some core values to get me through the tough times.

These core values, such as a positive attitude, hard work ethic, great communication, and being reliable are the building blocks of anyone’s success in life and can continue to pay dividends for years to come.

I created this website to help people like you develop and fine tune many different professional skills that are not taught in university so that you can hopefully prevent some of the stumbling that inevitably happens along the way.

Working on this site also motivates me to continue to learn and improve myself, an effort of constant-and-never-ending-improvement (CANI).

CANI is something that learned from one of my idols, Tony Robbins, and have used everywhere in my life.

The passion for improvement is the fuel that drives me to help myself and others achieve greatness. As a result, I strive to perform and conduct myself at the highest achievable level, something that I want to help you do too.

The Goal:

I want to cultivate an innovative and collaborative engineering community where we can all learn, improve, and become the best possible versions of ourselves.

We are entering a new age of engineering, accelerated by the changes in work environment many of us encountered during the pandemic.

The white collar industry is changing and, for the first time in many years, the upper hand is now with the employees.

I believe we will move toward more of individual, consultant type of approach, working more for ourselves and having more control over our working structure and environment.

We need to take this chance to adapt and propel ourselves as a result.

Life is like a rocket trajectory. We have to aim toward something and work hard to propel ourselves there.

Since the trajectory will be constantly changing due to life events, it will require us to relentlessly adapt to the current conditions as a pilot would, with endless attention and adjustment.

Want to Know More About Me?

Well of course I wasn’t always confident or successful in my life (and still working on it now). In fact, after graduating with a Masters in Aeronautics and Astronautics, I worked an amazing job for a few years doing propulsion technology research for the Department of Defense, but when the project was defunded and my mentor was fired, I was extremely disheartened and actually quit engineering.

I went through what I called a “quarter life crisis” and moved to New Zealand where I found myself scared and against the world. But it was at this level of discomfort, that I really started to find myself.

I ran out of money and ended up getting a job as a cocktail bartender in a place with a lot of international tourists, where I began to really learn about people and about the world.

I became an expert at customer service, communicating across different cultures, learning how to make people happy, and discovering what people really wanted in life. I had a lot of fun and became much more confident in myself, building huge skills that I would rely on later.

When I came home I was a new person, but when I decided to get back into engineering, I couldn’t. There were just not many jobs and I didn’t have any recent experience.

I worked bartending for a while, then construction, and later took a job as a sales associate at Lowes selling toilets to people (with a master’s degree in rocket science!). Again, I felt like I was at the bottom.

Through this tough time, I relied on my core values (discussed above) and started to greatly appreciate professional careers, and I began to respect engineering again.

When I finally saw an opportunity in engineering, even though it was something I wasn’t interested in at the time, I took it.

With this fresh start in engineering and new found gratitude for it, I began to embrace my identity as an engineer, learning new skills and fine tuning my old ones. I really started to gain traction toward success.

My performance was quickly recognized and I was promoted to engineering manager and quickly after passed my exam to become a Professional Engineer.

As I gain momentum in my career, great things continue to happen and I decided to share my experiences and insights with others by creating this site.