The Role of Innovation in an Engineering Career

3 Big Takeaways from this episode:

1. Engineering skills are highly transferrable and can lead to a multitude of career experiences in vastly different industries: Students: your first job out of college isn't a life sentence. Especially for engineers, there's potential for you to apply those foundational skills to any number of careers and fields you may not even know about yet. As an example, Alyssa shares how her first job after earning a biomedical engineering degree was in the automotive industry. Keep learning, keep working with cross-collaborative teams and you can build a career of unlimited experiences.
2. Innovation isn't just about creating the next big product on the market; innovation is about new ways to improve processes, systems, and products: While an R&D Engineering team does spend time designing new products, they also work to improve current product designs, improve manufacturing processes, and create more efficient systems - all with the goal of making a better experience for the end user. Innovation is about continuous improvement, looking at things with a fresh perspective and never accepting things as-is just because it's how they've always been.
3. Engineering on a global scale is a fascinating challenge that crosses multiple disciplines of engineering, different cultures and different ways to think about product design: Working on a global team developing products for many different geographies and markets, Alyssa has learned the value of having a diverse R&D Engineering team. Hear interesting anecdotes from Alyssa and Matt about designing products for different cultures and how thinking through challenges like these are important for today's engineering students.