Author: Xin Wang
On Feb 6th, 2022, DFWCIA hosted its first virtual leadership and career development seminar of the year. We are grateful to have two remarkable industry leaders: Annie Liu, Division Information Officer from Toyota Financial Services, and Dr. Jinrong Qian, Vice President from Texas Instruments, to share their stories on how to navigate organization dynamics, maximize their impact, and grow from an engineer to an extraordinary leader. Julia Liang, the DFWCIA President, organized the event and served as the moderator. 90+ people joined our seminar to learn how to prepare ourselves, from engineers to leaders.
Annie’s speech title is “Organizational Savvy.” She used her self-experience as an example of being more visible, outspoken, and self-promoting properly in a work environment. During the presentation, she also includes compelling theories like a pyramid diagram to illustrate why sometimes we feel we’re working hard but still not visible enough to get a promotion. In the SAVVY attitude introduction, the most impressive word to me is “Allies” as Annie mentioned, it’s imperative to have allies in a big company.
In Jinrong’s speech “from Engineers to Leaders,” he started with setting career goals and owning your career. Then he introduced the success factors for technical leadership roles – innovative, competitive, leadership, and results. As Jinrong pointed out, combined technical competence and leadership skills are mighty. It’s crucial to build your brand name, build relationships with your supervisor’s supervisor, support and make your boss successful.
During the Q&A session, the audience asked great questions such as “What do you see as the most common mistakes engineers make when they transition to leadership roles?”, “What do you see as the top 3 hurdles for Chinese Americans to advance in corporations in the US?” etc. We’re glad to see the audience was very engaging throughout the whole session.
This seminar is super helpful to our entire community. As Chinese Americans, we are a group of hard-working and technically strong people. What we lack as a group is: career planning, self-promotion, networking, leadership vision, and reasonable expectation and preparation. This seminar is another excellent example of the mission of our organization: “To inspire DFW Chinese IT professionals to pursue ethical, technical and professional excellence, advance their careers, and positively impact the society.”
At the end of the seminar, our President Julia Liang encouraged the audience to apply what they learned in today’s session and start proactively planning and managing their careers.