How Teaching has Propelled me to Succeed in my Engineering Career
And the lessons I’ve learned so far
Back in 2012, as a Mechanical Engineering freshman, I faced a really big challenge. I wasn’t really prepared for taking calculus so that class became a nightmare and I needed to grasp all the pre-calculus skills somehow. So, when looking for solutions, I decided to rely on self-learning. How hard could it be? I thought back then.
That way, in the following months, I found myself conducting tutoring sessions on which I was both the tutor and the student. What I did was to carefully read the textbook and then, aiming to check my understanding, I tried to explain it all back to myself in one of those mental self-talks we all use to have, right?
What I didn’t notice back then was how it enabled me to teach other people things. In fact, learning led me to become a teacher.
In 2014, I volunteered at my high school to teach physics and math to 10th graders so they could land college with a better knowledge base than me. It was challenging to get their attention and keep them motivated. However, the project lasted two years and I managed to impact over 50 people. It was amazing.
That was the first time I attempted to teach something to a group of people. After that, I got a lot more chances for doing so when I became a TA in college. It was funny to see how I enjoyed it more every time.
But my teaching-related experiences didn’t finish in college. After graduation, I landed a job at a tech company, and as such, its value is mainly based on knowledge. So, what a better place to teach, eh?
In the tech world, those who find success praise themselves as fast-paced self-learners. Companies look forward to hiring people capable of learning a new technology stack by themselves as fast as possible so the best candidate turns out to be the one who proves to be the quickest learner, and actually, this could even weight more than experience.
However, my approach is different. I truly believe that the best way to prove you’ve learned something well is to teach it to anyone else. When you rely solely on being able to do anything productive with the knowledge you’ve just gained, you are more prone to forget it once the task is over.
Hence, at my current work, I wanted to assess my learning by teaching. There, I’ve been involved in projects that require me to learn new technology stacks fast enough to make the knowledge productive, but I also proposed to conduct tutoring session on which I can teach my peers what I’ve just learned.
It was truly challenging since my co-workers have 5+ years of experience in the field, so, besides the challenge I also faced with the high schoolers of getting their attention and keeping them motivated, the big deal here has been how to add value to them through the tutoring sessions, which isn’t limited to what they didn’t already know about the technology stack we are discussing at the moment.
I’ve been dealing with this for several months now and it has turned to be a key differentiator for me among my peers. I’ve gained knowledge, respect and tons of experience while having fun. Now, I’ve got some learned lessons I want to share with you all.
First and foremost, don’t be afraid of teaching people that have been on the game longer than you. You’ll always have something new to teach them regardless of their experience. And this is particularly true in the tech world, where the older you get, the more prone to be outdated you are.
Second, the ultimate goal of the tutoring you are conducting is to ease the learning path for your audience. That way, the key results are how much they’ve learned and how much of that they can turn into productive knowledge. Hence, as you think about how to teach, you also need to think about how those results can be measured.
And last but not least, do your homework! Knowledge won’t come to you just by breathing, you’ve got to define how you’ll learn and how you’ll do it fast and well. This is way more challenging but believe me, it’ll pay off down the road. And even if teaching doesn’t go as expected, no one will take away what you’ve just learned, so you’d have also won!
So I wanted to show you how teaching turned from being my lifeboat when I first started college to being one of the most valuable strengths I can praise myself for at the corporate world. And now, I want to state it as an advice for you: teach more!
It’d be a really strong stepping-stone for your career if you start having a teaching-oriented mindset, on which you assess your knowledge based on what you can teach instead of what you’ve learned so far. That way, you’ll be focused on learning anything so well that you can teach it to anyone, you included.
At the end of the day, you can be the smart one that can learn anything fast and still fail to get noticed by people. Instead, if you’re the one that teaches them anything, you’ll never be forgotten.
