Technical prowess no longer guarantees a successful career in modern engineering. While a strong degree builds the foundation, the ability to translate complex solutions into customer value defines the true leaders of the industry. This shift requires professionals to master interpersonal skills and strategic thinking to navigate global operations successfully.
Shane Callanan, Vice President of Medical at Advanced Energy, joins the platform to share his transition from a technical contributor to a global leader. With three decades of experience in power conversion, Shane details how to maintain high standards across international teams and why trust serves as the bedrock of successful remote management.
THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
● Why technical skills alone are no longer enough.
● Building a marketing-led engineering culture.
● Managing global engineering teams via trust.
● Mentorship as a tool for talent retention.
● The next generation of engineering skill sets.
GUEST DETAILS
Shane Callanan is Vice President, Medical at Advanced Energy. Operating from the company's base in Cork, Shane leads high-performing engineering teams across international jurisdictions, including Minnesota, Mexico, and newly established operations in the Philippines. He is a seasoned senior leader who balances complex global engineering operations with a deep passion for mentoring graduate engineers and interns, driving both technical excellence and talent retention across the industry.
Connect with Shane:
● Advanced Energy Website
● Connect with Shane on LinkedIn
QUOTES
"Just being a strong engineer is not good enough anymore." - Shane Callanan
"If you want to go into growth, you have to actually move towards a marketing-led organisation." - Shane Callanan
"Hire people that you trust, and there are very few people in our organisation that need to be managed in a traditional way." - Shane Callanan
TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, here is an AI transcription:
Dusty Rhodes 0:01
Right now on Amplified.
Shane Callanan 0:02
Just being a strong engineer is not good enough anymore. If we want to differentiate, we have to be able to talk with our customers. We have to be able to identify what they need. We have to be able to work with them. And you do need a primary engineering degree, but you also need to develop, you know, the communication piece.
Dusty Rhodes 0:21
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Ireland podcast. Today, we're diving into the realities of how to lead a team of engineers when you're working across global operations. How do you keep high technical standards and strong team communications when you're managing projects that can be anywhere between Cork and Mexico and the U.S. to the Philippines. I mean, that's an engineering problem in itself. Joining us is a senior engineering leader who has done exactly this in the industrial and medical sectors. He is vice president of engineering at Advanced Energy. It's a pleasure to welcome Shane Callahan. How are you? Good to see you.
Shane Callanan 0:57
Thanks.
Dusty Rhodes 0:59
Listen, Shane. I always like to start off by asking, "What did you get into engineering for? What was it when you were a 12-year-old boy that you went, 'I want to do that'?
Shane Callanan 1:07
Yeah. Well, actually, I didn't take the typical path, Dusty, in terms of always wanting to be an engineer. In my teens, I knew what I didn't want to do, and it wasn't finance, and it wasn't banking, and you know, wasn't an office job. And as you start to eliminate, you know, all that's impossible. What's left is possible, type of thing. And around the time of maybe 16 or 17, I mean, like every teenage boy, I was always interested in fixing things and taking things apart. But it kind of drew my attention to the fact that, you know, engineering was kind of where I was going towards. I was, you know, I was reasonably good at maths and physics, and I enjoyed them in school. So that was a kind of a natural career path, and then when the CEO offers came out, it was a question of what type of engineering you want to do. But it was a kind of a gradual progress. And what's really interesting is that I started my choice of subjects by picking electronic engineering because I didn't really want to work in power or power generation. And then as you kind of grow, as you get opportunities and you start working, it actually became a real interest to me, so that's where I spent probably the vast majority of my 30-year career is working in power conversion. So that's how I ended up where I am, really.
Dusty Rhodes 2:10
So give me the story then. For about 10 years ago or so, you had your company, and then you had a big interest from the States, where you thought they were going to be buying a load of your stuff.
Shane Callanan 2:20
Yes, so we were a small private Irish company doing fairly well. A lot of industrial, a lot of medical, and a lot of high-tech type of stuff. You know, even if I think back of some of the stuff that we were doing 16 years ago, stuff that we take for granted, no, like 3D printers. But 15 years ago, this was completely new in terms of its technology. We were the driving force behind the enablement of that type of stuff, advanced technology, almost. And in December of 2016, we were at a trade show in Munich. We had an American company that came to our stall and looked at our product and liked our product. And at the time, we thought they might be interested in buying our product, but it turned out that they wanted to buy our company. So in July of 2017, we were officially acquired by an American company, Advanced Energy. Leaders in the plasma industry, what they wanted to do was diverge the market segments that they were going after. Medical was one of those market segments that they wanted to pursue, and purchasing us or acquiring us was the first step in that journey. Really, so I stuck with the company. I'm still with the company, still having fun, and eight years later, we're still on that road.
Dusty Rhodes 3:24
Did that change your career? Because up until the point of the sale, were you more into engineering, and now you're in a completely different realm?
Shane Callanan 3:32
I guess it did by default, because, like I said, being a small Irish company, you tend to be a jack of all trades. You know, we get great titles, but the reality is, it's all about survival. Yes, there's a profit part of it, and there's a reinvestment, and there's a growth. But you can never accelerate at the same rate without multinational investment. And coming on board, being a much bigger company, Avenged Stangersley wanted to create things on a scalability level. You know, they're always thinking about growth. They're always thinking about accelerated growth. So, pretty much for the first six years of my career, I travelled the world working with different engineering teams. And what I was asked to do was pretty much cut and paste what we've done in Cork because we had developed a really, really strong culture as a company. We had a can-do, must-do attitude because it was all about survival. And at the time as well, there was a lot to do with lean startup mentality coming into large organisations. So pretend you're a startup, even though you're a multinational organisation. But just figure out how to get stuff done. You know, work on solutions, not on problems. Think about the customer. What customer problem are you solving? Don't think about process or procedure in terms of being a barrier, but just be easy to work with, be easy to deal with, and and I guess for the first six years it was a question then of just going to China, going to Israel, going to North America, working with new cultures, new people, trying to identify how you can add to the culture. You don't want to take from the culture, but how you can add to the culture, but at the. Same time, try to align it so you create the foundation for growth. So that was kind of 2017 up to about the 2023-ish time frame with the organisation.
Dusty Rhodes 5:08
Okay, so bring me back then to before the Americans bought the company because you said you had a strong engineering culture, and this is what attracted them, and this is what you ended up travelling the world teaching other people globally. When you talk about strong engineering culture, what exactly is it? Do you mean? Give me an example.
Shane Callanan 5:25
Whenever you're involved with, particularly a small company, it grows and expands and changes all the time. So no matter what your service that you're providing, you know, be it software, be it hardware, be it bread making, whatever it is, you're an engineer or you're a baker, and that's where you start your company. If you're successful, it then moves into a kind of a sales-led organisation because now you've got a product to sell or a service to sell. So the sales team can kind of take over. But if you really want to go into growth, you have to actually move towards a marketing-led organisation. And it's not the glossy brochures. By marketing-led, what I mean is that you're out there, you're understanding exactly what your customer needs. You're able to create that differentiator from everybody else that's out there fighting to win the business, and our strength was the product that we were developing. So, with the support of Enterprise Ireland at the time, and with Engineers Ireland as part of their continuous professional development programme, we had created a really, really strong framework of getting engineers out in front of customers, understanding what they need, and actually be able to preempt what they need ahead of time, and that's what I mean by a strong engineering culture. We had the right people out in front of customers, talking their language, being able to exactly identify what they need from us.
Dusty Rhodes 6:40
Now that seems a little bit strange because you're an engineering firm. Engineers do one thing: they fix things, they make things, they create things to make things better. But you're sending me to customers.
Shane Callanan 6:51
Yeah, it's a very different type of engineer that's coming out now as a graduate. You know, the universities in Ireland have done a good job of identifying that. You know, just being a strong engineer is not good enough anymore. If we want to differentiate, we have to be able to talk with our customers. We have to be able to identify what they need. We have to be able to work with them. And you do need a primary engineering degree to be able to understand the fundamentals to begin with. But you also need to develop what used to be referred to as soft skills, you know, the communication piece, being able to temper your pitch if you're dealing with a CEO or whether you're dealing with a principal engineer, and I think that there's much more emphasis on that now in terms of career development for for engineers, and I think that's what makes the difference. So, engineering is no longer the kind of lab-based work where the traditional engineer with the calculator stuck in the pocket and loves to write notes and doesn't really make eye contact with you-that's a very changing requirement over the last couple of years.
Dusty Rhodes 7:49
What would you say to an engineer who goes, "Do you know I'm happy in my office, and I have my tools, and I know where everything is and nobody bothers me?" Have you seen an engineer like that who's then gone out and met?
Shane Callanan 7:59
It's horses for courses. So if you look at any team, any team structure, I describe it as each individual player is like a piece of Swiss cheese. Okay, we all have our strengths, we all have our weaknesses, but there are obviously glaring gaps in terms of where our weaknesses are. And what we've tried to do is that instead of everybody being good at everything, what we try to do is build a team, and if you layer the Swiss cheese on top of each other, there's no gaps. Yeah, so there are opportunities for engineers to leave the lab environment and go out. But yes, agreed, it's not for everybody, and we would never force anybody who we would clearly identify this is not going to be something that they're comfortable with. Now, what we would do is we would offer them the opportunity to dip their toe in the water, so maybe go on a kind of a buddy system by where they would travel to a customer. They would go in, they would get a taste for it. They would tell us then whether it's not for them or whether they would like to pursue it even further. If they would like to pursue it further, then we make it part of their career development. Again, leaning back on the continuous professional development framework that Engineers Ireland have, we would create a plan over a period of maybe one or two or three years as to how we develop the skill sets necessary for that individual to be more effective in the field. But in many cases, we've tried it, and it's been very clear this is not an individual who wants to spend time on the road. So yeah, we could bring them back into the lab, and we can develop a different career then for them.
Dusty Rhodes 9:23
Shane, can I ask you? Do you have any kind of particular examples or stories in your head of where this has happened? Where you kind of you brought the horse to water and it actually drank?
Shane Callanan 9:34
I'll use a generic example.
Dusty Rhodes 9:35
Okay, perfect.
Shane Callanan 9:36
We had a very talented individual who we hired, and we felt that this was a person that we could grow into a leadership role over a period of five to 10 years. Was the plan, and for some reason, we could never get as much as we felt we should be getting out of them as a design engineer. So you kind of scratch your head, you think, you know, this is a star player. Put him in centre forward, and he's not scoring goals type of thing. So why is it that he's not scoring as many goals as we know he has the potential to score? And actually, what we discovered was that his skill set was probably best suited for what we call project management. And we moved him into project management. We got him out in front of customers, and he became one of our star players because it wasn't that he couldn't do it, but he really didn't like the repetitiveness of being in the lab every day, working on the same programme. He preferred a more dynamic environment, working internationally, that type of stuff. And as soon as we made the switch, then we saw the spark. Then we saw that the person come to life. Then we saw the person achieve what we knew that they could achieve.
Dusty Rhodes 10:37
Let's get back to yourself, Shane. Can you give me an overview of your day-to-day, what your role involves?
Shane Callanan 10:43
What I like about myself is that there is no typical day. Generally, I work across a lot of time zones. So early in the morning, it's probably calls in the Far East, Singapore, Shanghai, and then as the day progresses, it moves from east to west, and then in the evening it finishes probably in Mexico, which is probably the minus eight time zone. But generally, what we would do is that we have a number of projects that are on the go. We would have a number, obviously, of lead customers that we have important actions that need to move forward. So, on a day-to-day basis, what I like to do is I like to I like to have a list ready to go, non-exhausted list of you know 50 or 60 things, maybe four or five things that need to be done in any given day, my role does involve a lot of delegation at this stage. So I generally don't have the answers, but I do know the guy who has the answers. So what I'm doing is I'm reaching out and I'm making sure that the top four or five things in any given day have to be resolved, and I'm reaching out to those individuals to make sure that that we can coordinate with the various events to get things done.
Dusty Rhodes 11:40
All of this is being done remotely. How do you manage engineers when they are they're in different time zones, they're in different cultures, different ways of working? I mean, how do you handle and inspire engineers when everything is literally changing on an hour-by-hour basis for you?
Shane Callanan 11:57
It is. It is. And generally, the keyword here that I would use is trust. You hire people that you trust, and there's very few of people in our organisation that need to be managed in a traditional way because we're all professional people, we're all high achievers. We want to make a difference in the market segments that we're working in, and particularly the medical market segments. You know, hopefully things like invasive surgery will reduce over generations to generation. Things like cancer treatment will become much easier and less destructive. That's in the market segments that we're in and where we're working towards. So you ask the question: How do you get people motivated and excited? Well, first and foremost, if you're an engineer and you're not motivated by the fact that that you're going to make a change to medical treatment, then it's time to get out. Yeah, you're in the wrong profession. So that's the first thing. We are in a very exciting environment, and that's what generates the excitement from engineers. But managing remotely, there there is no management. So what we do is that we hire good people, we put them into a solid framework, and then we put balances and checks in place to make sure that we're moving at the right pace. It's all about being able to adapt to the environment. The world is continuously changing, you know, especially in the last couple of years with all the conflict and all the change that's happened in the last two years. We're constantly reassessing: Are we working on the most important thing? Are we doing it the most effective way? But it really is about putting key people into roles around the world that I trust that will drive the team forward in a manner that we want to do so.
Dusty Rhodes 13:25
It all sounds very kind of like high pressure. There's a lot to be done, a lot of decisions to be made, a lot to discuss, and it's like bam, bam, bam. It's all work, work, work, work, work. How do you have any kind of a personal relationship with these people?
Shane Callanan 13:36
Yeah. Well, what's really important is physically getting out there. So I do spend a lot of my time travelling. I do spend a lot of time with the teams, and one of the things I try to do, and now maybe my team might tell me differently, but I do try to make a connection as part of my role. Whenever I go on site, I'll allocate time to talk to anybody in the team that wants to talk to me. If they're an intern, if they're the senior vice president, whatever they want, I'll find the time for them. And really, it's about understanding what is it that gets you excited about the job that you're doing, and what do you want out of your career. My job is a facilitator. My job is to provide the opportunity. I won't be the one that's coaching you. I won't be the one that's teaching you. But if I can understand what motivates you as an engineer, and if I can see the spark in your eye, and you tell me that you want more, my job is to work with you and and really work with your team. And there's a whole HR structure, there's a whole senior leadership team, but my job is to work with that team to create those opportunities for each of the team, and that's how we generally drive forward people's careers.
Dusty Rhodes 14:38
Now, I'm thinking about an engineer listening to the podcast is kind of thinking, yeah, I'd like to be working with teams around the world and have that responsibility. A lot of what you're talking about, Shane, is you've gone from engineering to handling people. Where do you learn all this stuff?
Shane Callanan 14:53
Well, I was lucky enough to take a lot of formal courses over the years in doing. And really, what it is is that you can still have the personality, but there is a framework there. You know, in terms of if if I talk about career progression, for example, there's probably going to be four or five main traits that at any level you have to have. For an engineer, you have to have a certain amount of subject matter expertise. You have to be able to work as part of a team, you have to be able to communicate both internally and externally, and you have to have that hunger for growth in terms of what's the next step for me. So what I'm describing here is very close to an algorithm, because what you can do for each of those characteristics, what you can do is you can identify: Are you a novice? Are you a competent? Are you an expert in each of those criteria? As you go through your career, all you simply do is raise the bar in terms of well, what's your communication when you're a graduate engineer? Your communication is with your immediate team, so that's what you need to work on. As you work into a senior rank, well, I'm going to ask you to do some coaching and mentoring with some junior members, so you have to develop your mentoring skills, as you move into, let's say, a member of technical staff, I will expect you to be able to talk to our CEO. So therefore, we have to coach you and mentor you and walk you through those skill sets. And we've actually done that as part of our training, where we'll take a video camera, we go to the conference room, okay, talk about anything you want for five minutes, then we critique it, and it's the ums and the urs and the rattling of the keys, and you know you're back facing to the. And we actually go through all that. And I've been lucky enough to have been coached and mentored over the years of of doing all of that, and and hopefully now then we were putting structures in place to develop our engineers in that fashion. And like I said, there was a time they were referred to as soft skills, I would say that they're a must-have for any modern engineer in your toolkit.
Dusty Rhodes 16:45
It's something I hear over and over again: is that you need human skills, you need to be able to deal. But when you learn how to deal with other people and talk to other people and get on with it, firstly, your job becomes more fun. There's more crack in it. You learn more. You get way more job satisfaction because now instead of just dealing with a nameless person, you're seeing your work has been put into Bob's whatever it is, Bob's building. There you go. Talk about simplifying engineering, but anyway, apologise.
Shane Callanan 17:11
You know what it does? I mean, I'm a firm believer it does boil down to people, and if you can create an environment by where people feel safe to speak their mind. Now I keep saying this to the team: you have to be respectful. Criticism, no critiquing. Yes, if you have a problem with me, come into my office and close the door. Don't berate me out in front of 100 people. You know, but being able to create that type of environment where people come in and say, "Shane, I think you're wrong, is really something that we work hard at to create that type of environment.
Dusty Rhodes 17:43
It takes a lot of gumption to go into the boss and say, "I think you're wrong. Yeah, can you give me an example of somebody who did that? Generic.
Shane Callanan 17:51
I can give you lots of examples. They can be here, but...
Dusty Rhodes 17:55
go on.
Shane Callanan 17:55
I had an engineer who I hired, and at the time, their role was to back from my position so I could progress. At the time of my career, I was making that transition from an individual contributor into a team lead, and that is actually the hardest transition you'll ever make in your career because all along you're the one that's doing the job, you're the one that's that's solving the problem, but now you're moving into a team role where you're no longer expected to solve the problem, you're expected to have somebody on your team that can solve the problem. And I spent a lot of time in hindsight. It was actually micromanagement, and I was kind of over his shoulder, and I was making sure, oh, I wouldn't do it that way. I would, you know, I change. And he said, "Can I have a word? You know, and yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, sure. So we found a quiet spot. He said, "Shane, but all due respect, he said, "You hired me for a reason. Please let me do my job. You know, and it was a realisation for my part. It was like, okay, if he had never said that to me, we would have continued, and it would have led to conflict. He had had the, you know, the openness and the confidence to be able to say, Shane, like you've got to back off and let me do my job. And I've always remembered that moment in terms of putting myself in the other person's shoes and trying to even you know you drive me home in the evening. Is there something different I could have done or should have done today? And like I said, I could give you lots of examples of where I've made mistakes. But really, one of the things that I do, even my own staff call, I have the bullet points. You know, leave your title at the door. You can pick it up on the way home. You're in this meeting for a reason, so I want to hear your voice. And criticism, no. Critiquing, yes. But come with a problem, come with a solution as well. That we can discuss more talking about the solutions rather than the problems. When things go wrong, not if things go wrong, but when things go wrong, it's about root cause, countermeasures, not a blame game. I never want to hear it's their fault, it's my fault. It's it. It's no, no, no, no, no. Let's remove the personalities. Let's be engineers about it. Root cause, countermeasure. But when you're very explicit about things like that, then even as the younger engineers are coming into our place, they see that's part of our culture. It's actually okay. To go and knock on the door. Hey, Shane, have you got 10 minutes? I need 10 minutes. Yes, of course, you can do things like that. I've been in organisations by where you barely made eye contact with some of the senior executives as they breezed through the building. That's a different type of generation that certainly I don't want to be part of anymore.
Dusty Rhodes 20:14
Here's a problem I'd like to ask you about because we've been talking about you know existing firms or existing teams and everything you say is brilliant, but what if I'm an engineer and then I'm told, okay, you need to set up a team in Mumbai. All right, just think of somewhere really far away, and and you're dealing with a new engineer, or even do you know what? If you have to set up a new team and you have to hire people because hiring is is a skill in itself, how do you go about setting up a brand new engineering team in a new region.
Shane Callanan 20:43
Yes, so I've done it several times over my career. And first thing is that you have to identify why you want to set it up in that location. Is it because you want to position it near customers, or is it you want that there's a gene pool there for engineers for growth? Is there good infrastructure there? Is there good power? You know all these things you have to consider where you're going to do it. Once you establish then where you're going to do it, it really is about spending time over there with people who have connections. Because what you want to do, the most important thing that you do is hire a strong leader over there. If you hire a strong leader, that's the good basis then for your team. If you don't hire the leader to begin with, or if you don't hire a strong leader, irrespective of the team that you're putting in place, it's a recipe for disaster.
Dusty Rhodes 21:27
Now, let me ask you about that. How do you find a strong leader? Because it sounds a lot easier than I'm sure it is in practice.
Shane Callanan 21:34
And what you have to do is you have to bring in people that think differently to the way that you do. So, if the first question that I would ask of our HR team that's hiring is: This person going to add to the culture that we want to create, or will they take from the culture that we want to create? So you set the grounds for the rules of engagement. You don't want to hire superstars and build a team around superstars. You don't want to hire average people because you just be an average team. But if you can get a full team of above-average performers, you've got the foundation and for growth. So what you need to do is firstly spend time over there. You're going to spend a lot of time talking to a lot of people, getting a lot of different backgrounds. But then once you assemble your interview team, make sure that each person on that team understands the role that they play in the interview process. There's a particular trait that I want you to investigate. For example, talk to them about communication. You're good at communication. You know a good communicator when you see it. Your job is to tell me can I coach this person to where we need to be in a few years' time. I'll ask the technical people, obviously, to do the technical interview. It's a yes/no. That's an easier one. The reader has to level it or not. But then, in terms of you, make sure that you hire somebody who's willing to go to the next S-curve on their career. So don't bring them in as an engineering manager and expect them to stay as an engineering manager for the next 20 years. I want you to tell me how far could I take this person? Could they be the next VP of engineering? Could I be reporting into them in 10 years' time? They're the questions that I ask of my team, and that's the type of leader then that we're trying to hire for those teams.
Dusty Rhodes 23:09
So you're looking for ambition?
Shane Callanan 23:10
Ambition, capability, and drive.
Dusty Rhodes 23:14
Now this sounds great. I'm flying halfway around the world. I'm going to talk to loads of people, and we're going to find the best ones. We find a great leader, and this is not like an endless project. All right, you are obviously under some kind of a time constraint in order to get it done. What kind of time period are you given to do this?
Shane Callanan 23:32
In the modern world, I don't think you can think beyond the next quarter. It's that much pressure. But again, things don't happen by chance. Before you start a recording, we talked about strategy, and really the most important thing to do is that you don't jump into tactics. So you don't suddenly jump on an aeroplane, fly to the Philippines, try to hire people, and then try to set them up. What you're doing is you start with your situation analysis. Where are we right now in terms of where we want to be? So once you know where you are on the map, then you can set your objective. So we need to get from A to B by C. That's the type of thinking that you need to do. Then you start to think about what's the strategy for us to get there. Okay, we want to let's say we want to penetrate more customers in a certain location. Well, I want to do that by putting customer service and an engineering team and somebody who can visit that customer on a regular basis know you've established what your strategy is. The next thing are the tactics. But if you get the first three right, it's not such a big ordeal because there's a whole infrastructure that has to be created when you're creating new teams. There's you know simple stuff like bench area, lab area, access to material, all that stuff. That's all part of your objectives when you're setting your targets as to what you need for the team.
Dusty Rhodes 24:43
This is all very kind of like you know you're going in and you're building a new base and it's a permanent thing for you. What about for engineers who are working on projects where it's like we have to build X building we've got two years and it's in Dubai? How would you go around building a team in a foreign place like that? Would you apply?
Shane Callanan 25:01
The exact same principles. But I think the added variable then is that you need to understand about culture. So one size does not fit all. And if you're working in the Middle East, or if you're working in the Far East, or even if you're working throughout Europe, and some say even if you're working throughout Ireland, you know I'm a pretty small place, but we have several different cultures in Ireland. So I think the key, the only difference that I would add to that. The only other variable is that understand the culture, and understand what's acceptable, understand what's not acceptable, understand how to engage with people. Understand that as Europeans we use a lot of our hands, and we're we're very kind of we're very gesture driven. Whereas you go to Far East, there's not. Understand that if you make a presentation to a group of Asian engineers, for example, don't expect any questions because sometimes it's seen as just disrespectful that you, if they're asking questions, it means you haven't made a full presentation. Whereas if you go to the US, as soon as you finish your slide, okay, it's like a it's a it's like a gap and gun, you know. And so it's small things like that that you need to be aware of when you're building teams outside of where where you normally have it at.
Dusty Rhodes 25:59
So wherever it is that you're gathering your engineering team for the project, wherever it is in the world, how do you onboard them? I mean, what makes a successful onboarding, and what are the common mistakes?
Shane Callanan 26:10
Yeah, the common mistakes. Assuming that one size fits all, we deal in medical power systems; they're dangerous. So, from an induction point of view, we have to get through all the rigmarole, the safety first. But once we get that out of the way, we start to engage very quickly about where you are, where you are aligned with the strategy and the part that you play in terms of the overall strategy being successful. So whether you have a team of five people, 500 people, or 5000 people, you have somebody on that team for a reason. They're playing a part, and you have to be very quickly, especially for the ones that that that you're going to invest time in in the future. You have to very quickly align objectives with the with the strategy. So your role is A, B, and C. There's 500 out there that do all the other things, and if we accumulate all those together, we'll be successful with our strategy. If you don't bring your part to the table, you should be able to tell me what the impact of that is. So establishing that very quickly is key. Also, understanding what gets them excited, what gets people up in the morning and into the lab in the office, and and you know stay late when it's necessary, and enjoy themselves because we probably spend more time with our teammates than we do with our family on a regular basis. And you know if you're not having fun, you're not going to get the best out of yourself. So, trying to establish what is it that generally excites you about your role, and then the next step, then longer term, you can start to talk about okay, like where do you want to be in five years' time? Sounds a bit cheesy, but unless you specifically talk about it, you're never going to get there. Things don't happen by accident. That's the key thing. So, there's the make sure that you create the first impression, right? Make sure that you get the excitement early, and then start talking about long term career plans in that order. That's part of the onboarding and successful onboarding.
Dusty Rhodes 27:51
This is really interesting conversation, all right, because normally we're talking about engineering, whereas now this is like engineering engineers. How do you take them in? How do you grow them? One of the things with taking on people in any business, particularly in engineering as well, is keeping people, keeping talent in the same. Because it seems to be you some about the new generation who are coming up. They do two years here, they do two years there. Da da da. I've heard stories where people go, "Well, I'm going to go to that job. I know I'm not going to move up the ladder. So what I do is I look for a job in another company with more pay, that's how they go. So it's a big problem for engineering firms and anybody who's leading a team of engineers to keep the same people. So talent retention is a thing. You're a believer in mentorship from everything that you're saying. How do you think a strong mentorship programme directly improves talent retention?
Shane Callanan 28:43
More and more people are looking for careers, not just jobs. And in my experience, what they want to feel is that they're making a difference. The best thing that that you can say to any engineer, any person, any role, hey, do you know what? You made a difference today. You know, you don't overdo it because it it loses its effectiveness. Yeah. But what people are looking for is, you know, how can I progress to the next stage? At the good people I'm talking about here now, the people who are going to make a difference in an organisation. So mentorship and coaching are absolutely paramount for any organisation. If you're working in a role that doesn't have it, I would say question yourself about whether you want to stay there or not.
Dusty Rhodes 29:22
So, how do you go about that mentorship and coaching? How do you do it?
Shane Callanan 29:25
It's a team approach. So, you start with the strategy, then you start to look at what does that strategy mean in terms of the skill sets that we need to have on our team to be successful. Then I use the Swiss cheese analogy again, where you know you have each individual with their strengths and weaknesses, but by the time you layer up all the Swiss cheese, it should be a solid block. Then again, it it ties back to the continuous professional development framework that Engineers Ireland rolled out. What you need to do is you need to align with objectives and career progression. You need to be able to think about it if you. 1000 engineers all generating pieces of data on a daily basis. How do you share that knowledge? How do you store it in the place, and how do you share it, and how do you get it out there? So we would do a series of learning lunches, for example, by where engineers would present other engineers, and that in itself then gets the individuals excited about it because you have the younger engineers looking at us, kind of saying, how do I get there? You have the older engineers. How do we develop our skill set to be able to present to a wider group? And it's all those extra pieces. And in terms of retention, I often say to everybody, when you're counting down to midnight, December 31, wherever you are in the world, whether whether it's a club soda or a glass of wine in your hand, and it's 10 nine eight, you've got to think about yourself january 1 in the same year, and if you haven't progressed your career within that year, it's been a bad year for you professionally, and then you have to ask yourself the question why. If it's a question of I'm not motivated to do it, then you're probably on the way out, is the way I would put it. But if it's a question of you know I have personal issues, or maybe there was something happened in my life, and I wasn't able to do it this year. Now you can get back up on the horse. Or the third one is that you know what? My boss isn't strong enough. He or she has not pulled me off, and now I need to take ownership of my career, and I need to go and talk to somebody who's going to help me. That's the motivation. That's the energy that we continue to drive into the team in order to make sure that we retain people, because yes, you mentioned hiring people is difficult; retaining people is difficult. I use the phrase "faraway fields are always greener, but that's because it rains a lot more over there. But it's trying to make sure that people, if they do see early warning signs of losing that energy, that they react early to it and have a conversation about it.
Dusty Rhodes 31:41
You're dealing with teams all over the world, and you're making calls every day, and you've only got a limited amount of time. You can't mentor everybody, so how do you structure a mentorship programme? Do you have older members of staff who look after younger ones, or..?
Shane Callanan 31:55
You know, we talked about graduate engineers, and we talked about developing engineers, and senior engineers, and progressing onto principal engineers and so forth. I also talked about the skill sets that are required to take you to the next level. So part of the requirements of your career development is that at some stage in your career you turn from the mentee into the mentor. We explicitly make that part of personal development skills. Listen, Shane, you're a great engineer, but by God, you're terrible at communicating. Okay, so in five years' time, I'm going to bring in five graduates. I'm going to put them under your wing, and in five years' time, I want you to churn out five senior engineers for me. But the first thing you need to do is you need to work on your communication skills. So we're going to put you on a course to develop your communication skills so that you can coach these kids that are coming in and be able to be more effective. Sometimes it works out because you're giving the person the skill set. Sometimes then you run into a brick wall, and all of a sudden then you have to go to Plan B. But what's Plan B then? You bring in somebody else. So it's that type of continuous adjustment and setting expectations of you're an individual contributor. You're going to move into some sort of a lead role. You're going to develop those skill sets. You do have to be able to make those transitions as you develop your career.
Dusty Rhodes 33:09
Now, listen. Speaking of skills and developing your career, we've got a new generation of engineers coming in, as always. What skills do you think the next generation of engineers are going to need to succeed, particularly in a global scale, like we're talking about today?
Shane Callanan 33:23
Firstly, understand your audience. I think that's really important. It's not easy. It's not easy. I'll admit, it's not easy to manage that. But you do have to. And would would I would I be jealous of the new generation of engineers coming out? No, I'm not sure. Okay, because it's much more challenging. And the difficulty with the next generation is that I grew up in an era where I read newspapers and I read from I even read from encyclopaedias, but all of that data was vetted by people in authority who said, "Yes, this is true. It's it's the Irish Times. It's fact. Yeah, I think the next generation, what they have to do is that it there's so much availability to information. There's two things that they need to do. They need to stop focusing on the answers, and they need to start focusing on the questions because with everything that's available, it's easy to find the answers. So a key skill set that needs to be developed by the next generation is identify what's the right question rather than what's the answer, and the second stage to that then is that vet your source. You know, TikTok is not an official engineering source, so don't believe it when you see it. Yeah. So, and I think that's probably the two biggest challenges that I see for the next generation in general is to identify the right question and just vet your source.
Dusty Rhodes 34:37
I love that. There's a great phrase around that. I'm sure it's been bandied around several places. It's like kind of you know that that's not the answer. You need to write, ask the right question. I've just heard that somewhere. It's a very famous something I can't remember, but you need to.
Shane Callanan 34:49
Even the phrase prompt engineering is starting to evolve. So when you're using AI or cloud or whatever that might be, it's what's the right prompt that you use.
Dusty Rhodes 34:59
That's the very. Definition of you need to ask the right question, isn't it? You know, in a sense. Listen, last question for you today, Shane, because we've been talking a lot about you know engineers coming in and progressing their careers and eventually becoming the boss. What advice would you give to a graduate engineer who's just starting out in the industry today, who has ambitions to one day be the boss?
Shane Callanan 35:20
Start off with a multinational because they have the framework and the process and procedure and all the levels that are there. Spend some time in a startup because in a startup it's survive or die. Yeah, and you will learn so much about running a business and keeping a business afloat if you're in a startup, and with hindsight, it's a really, really fun time to be if you can get involved in in a startup. Now it'll give you a lot of grey hairs because you're looking at the bookings and billings, and you're thinking we may not have money in the account at the end of the month to pay staff. But it's a fantastic experience. Then take that startup mentality, and then go back to your multinational, or as branch off and start up your own company. But I think that there's a certain amount of can do, will do attitude. As my father used to say, a little bit of common sense goes a long way, and there are the skill sets that you need to develop. But communication is the key thing if you want to be a leader of people in any organisation. You have to be able to communicate up and down, and you have to be able to temper that. Whether it's with shareholders, or with your CEO, or with a principal engineer who doesn't make eye contact with you, you're going to have to learn to communicate across a range of different skills. And that would be one of the key things that I would put time and effort into if I was to develop my career from the beginning as well, it's communication.
Dusty Rhodes 36:45
If you would like to find out more about Shane Callanan's work and the initiatives at Advanced Energy, you'll find all the links and details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Shane Callanan, Vice President, Medical at Advanced Energy, thank you so much.
Shane Callanan 37:00
Thanks, Dusty. I've enjoyed it.
Dusty Rhodes 37:02
And if you've enjoyed our conversation today, please do share this episode with a colleague or a friend in the industry. They can find us by searching for Engineers Ireland wherever you get your podcasts. The Amplified Podcast is produced by Dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For more episodes, industry insights, and career development opportunities, do visit our main hub at engineersireland.ie. Until next time, from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.