Using Business Planning Best Practices for Career Management and Better Career Decision Making

Abstract

A career can easily span forty to fifty years. Over that time span an engineer in the petroleum industry will earn several million dollars in income. According to the 2010 SPE Salary Survey, the mean salary for all respondents with 19 years experience was $139,194 with over a 5% salary increase from the prior year. Almost a third of respondents had a car allowance. On the front page of USA Today, May 24, 2011, the headline read "Petroleum engineering majors can grease skids." Further in the article, the projected salary for a petroleum engineering major over a 40-year career was $4.8 million! Associated with the revenue, there will be living expenses and capital investments for items such as house and these will also amount to several million dollars. Each of you will have to make decisions that will impact both revenue and expenses. Each of you is equivalent to a small business! How come more engineers don't make use of established business planning best practices to manage careers? There are several things every engineer must remember. It is your career and, therefore, your responsibility to manage it. Each of you has the skill set learned through your university education or your industry experience to manage your career. This is a global, interconnected industry and your reputation will follow you from location-to-location and company-to-company. Finally, when you look back on your career, are you going to be happy with how you managed it? This paper will provide an example of using business planning practices, including decision analysis, to manage a career. There are other ways to manage your career, including just letting it take its own course. Each person needs to determine what approach works best for her.