Jack of all trades, master of none. That’s the idiom told to me when I first started my career as an engineer. After working for three years, I began to notice that engineering is a field which gathers all the trades. Of course, when you have been nurtured as a striker in a soccer game, we thought you will just do the attacking job. That’s the old-fashioned thinking. Nowadays, everything has evolved. You need to be more versatile to be in the team.
I began to understand my director’s stance of involving his engineers in many different fields. In the end thing what you learned from one field helps you in another area. So how about the jack of all trades thing? Well, I won’t rule it out completely. At a tender working experience age like mine, it’s still far to be master of one. Like the Chinese saying goes, “Not enough stove fire yet”.
Learning something new is daunting experience to some. Why? Because you might be learning it from someone younger than you. In other word, “ego”. Some times it could also be fear of failure. I found it tough at first when I was told to go Thailand office to help up for a structural job there. Being an engineer with just one building design to my credit, I don’t consider myself to be qualified enough to do the task when there were 40 structural engineers there.
Just like bungee jumping, the first step is always the toughest to make. After you overcome that, it’s either you enjoy the experience of falling down or end up throwing the breakfast you’ve just eaten. Bad or good experience, it’s always something you need to deal in life to make that one shift into another gear. I had both but I treat the bad as another circle of life. You learned from mistake, don’t repeat it and move on with life.
Be frank with me? How many of you prefer a life of 8 to 5 working hours with no worry to be carried back to home? I will go to the extent of raising my legs to be one of them. Of course that would the ideal job. But in reality I can’t. Lately, I’ve been bringing some of the work to home. Well, this is not a routine task where I can solve the problem with a snap of the finger. Doing engineering is something you need to adapt to new standard, design criteria and lots of new formula.
You need those extra hours to gorge down the books so you will be prepared by the weekday. I must say I’m lacked the so-called site experience of an engineer. I was always jibed by senior engineers because of that. Youtube is a very good tools for us who never seen the real thing before. I’m grateful for one crane operator who took video of him handling the container during his work.
From there, I saw the road marking colour inside the port which I used in my design criteria. Who would have thought yellow and white line serves different purpose in port? When you can’t find any design book or guide to tell you, real life example is a good source of information.
Michael Jackson once said,
“The world greatest education is to watch the expert performs”.
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