Last week was our last lecture for the fall semester and it ended with a bang. I am pretty confident that the class’ consensus was that Alan Benevides was the most informative, interesting, and rewarding lecture we had all semester. We thought there were other great ones as well but Mr. Benevides really explained to us what it is like in the work force and finally explained to me what exactly a consulting engineer was. I always heard this terminology, but I never understood what it truly was, but since this talk, all I want to be is a consulting environmental engineer.
Mr. Benevides’ definition of what a consulting engineering is “a person who offers professional engineering services and expertise to both public and private sector organizations. They also act as independent agents and advocates for their clients, and are responsible for finding innovative solutions for technical problems and provide strategic advice to business and management.” To me this seems like a person who has a lot of responsibility and has intelligence in both the field and the business world. A person that has the technical skills but also has the ability to be “likeable” and acquire clients by gaining trust from the work you have previously done. Basically, a consulting engineer puts the fate of his/her job on themselves, as they are responsible for their own success or failure. After hearing this definition and understanding the context of the definition, I knew that this job description fit my own personal description. I believe I have the technical and business skills to be a consulting engineer, as I would like to be a seller and a doer. This “seller” and “doer” concept is what I will discuss next. In the consulting business there are four types of engineers: doers, doer-sellers, seller-doers, and sellers. Mr. Benevides is a seller-doer and from my understanding, he does his job a lot better than most do. All consulting engineers have their own utilization number, depending on their experience and job description. A ultilzation number represents the amount of time in a year you have to be billing clients for the hours of work you do. For example, if you have an 88% utilization number, then most likely you are an entry level engineer. An entry level engineer fits in the “doer” description, as all they do is technical work and have no responsibility in sales. This means that the person is not selling anything, but performing technical work that is billable. They need to make sure that most of the hours that they work are utilized towards that perspective. On the other hand, Mr. Benevides has a utilization that was around 50%, which means half of the time he is searching for clients and selling them the service that the doers (entry level engineers, engineer 2, engineer 3, ex..) will do, but technically Mr. Benevides is not billing his clients for the service he is doing. This means that he needs to make sure he is acquiring clients so the company can make money, and if he does not, than it does not compensate the few hours he is billing the clients, and he will most likely be out of his job. The reason I said Mr. Benevides is more talented than others in the workforce is because he is suppose to be bringing around $600,000 for the company according to the sales/utilization model, but he told us that has already brought in $2,000,000 for the company! I think this is why he is the Vice President of the company and that he has acquire 2% in shares of the net worth of the company.
Lastly, at the end of the discussion we had the opportunity to ask him a few questions. I asked Mr. Benevides what he thought was the most common weakness for entry level engineers and responded that their writing skills are by far their most common weakness. I was shocked in the answer as I thought it was going to be a skill that was more technical, but I guess that is the purpose of these talks, which is to learn things about the engineering business world that you never knew.