Passing the Professional Engineering Exam!!

In the fall of 2008, I decided that I should try to take the Professional Engineering exam. If I became a Professional Engineer, then I caould use Electrical Engineer and Consultant in the same sentence :) .

Since I had not taken the Engineer in Training exam, I needed to go through quite a process for requesting a waiver for that. Because of my age and experience, I qualified to apply for the waiver. After following the steps for getting the waiver, I then went through the application process for taking the exam. The process is set up to prevent professional exam takers from getting into the exam and learning and selling the questions.

During this time I had begun the studying process. It was quite a lot of work, and brought back many memories of my college days. I purchased some suggesated reference books, and some study exams and workbooks that are supposed to prepare you for the exam, and bought two new calculators that are approved for the exam, one that has RPN that I am used to, and another one that has matrix calculation capability.

It was now April, just before the exam date, so I decided which reference books were the most useful to me, and worked out hundreds more study problems.....

On the night before the exam, I packed up all of the reference books, and my calculators, and study questions, worked out problems, and a lunch into a suitcase.

The next morning, the exam started.

I was sure that I had not studied quite enough, and that I would need to take the exam again, so I was just going through this exam as a practice, to see how everything was done, and to get the feel for how to better prepare.

It was a long eight hours..... I was happy when it was over, and I knew where I needed to study more for my next attempt.

So, for the next ten or eleven weeks, I continued studying the areas that I felt I needed more practice in, and then a letter came in the mail that containeed the exam results.....

I passed!!!!!!!

They don't tell you any more information than whether you did or did not pass, but I had passed, and I didn't care about anything else :) :)

I applied for my license number, which took only a day to get back, and then applied for the National Society of Professional Engineers, and the Minnesota Society of Professional Engineers.

It feels good to get that under my belt, and now I can say that I am an Electrical Engineering Consultant !! :)

Small Business Marketing

I'm an electrical engineer, one who is particularly marketing challenged :)

I've subscribed to Ilise Benun, the Marketing Mentor's e-newsletter, http://www.marketing-mentor.com/ and one of the links in one of her newsletters was to a telephone interview with Bob Bly, http://www.bly.com/newsite/Pages/index.php .

One of the topics that was talked about in this telephone interview was blogging. I've seen it 100 times, that having a blog is good for directing traffic to your web site. But, I don't know what I would blog about?? Do people care what I have to say??

So I finally decided to give this a try and see what happens?? Maybe I can provide some information that I have learned about the challenges of running a small business that may be useful to another small business owner??

My first thought is blogging about marketing, since that is what I'm working on today, and I would like to share a few of the resources I have found helpful to someone who has very little marketing skills, but willing to research and try new things.

First I recommend signing up for Ilise's newsletter, it arrives every couple weeks and is a good reminder to put your marketing hat on and do something productive for your marketing. She has some very useful information that she enjoys providing for people in need like myself.

Another good resource is Biznik, http://biznik.com/ . Biznik isn't very active in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota right now, so I don't get the benefit of the networking part of Biznik, however, the bi-weekly newsletter that they send out is loaded with articles people have submitted on various topics about running a small business, including marketing strategies.

Both of these resources have information about blogging, which, now that I have set up a blog, I will go back and review so that I can learn how to use my blog as a productive marketing tool.

Thank you for reading, and have a great day!!