Planning for the future can be a daunting process. Budgets, new technologies, shifts to the industry landscape: all these factors play a part in determining what the coming weeks and months hold and how a business might strategize for success.
Central to that forward-thinking approach at Catch is our people – as they are in everything we do. Planning for a bright future means ensuring there are individuals in place who are able and empowered to carry the business forward, continuing to live out the Catch Difference in every engineering decision and client interaction they’re a part of.
To that end, we’re joined today by Dana Ilych, Electrical Manager at Catch focusing on mentorship, continuous learning, and inclusivity, to give us a sense of how Catch is living its values through an ongoing commitment to mentorship, leadership-driven culture, and investment in people.
Living Our Values and Innovating Toward the Future
A Mentorship Culture
A business’s people are its most prominent drivers of success – and Catch knows it. That’s why the entire leadership team at Catch approaches its company culture with a keen eye toward mentorship and internal development. That way, the business’s success and ongoing innovation don’t just stay the purview of a select few individuals but become a companywide mandate in which everyone participates.
This is perhaps most easily recognizable in Catch’s approach to Engineers-In-Training (or EITs) and its culture of mentorship, as Ilych takes the time to explain.
“We make it a point to ensure our EITs are constantly being exposed to various fields, experiences, and projects,” Ilych told us. “They do much more than just introductory theoretical work. We get them out there in the field so that they can see how everything they’ve worked on and learned starts to take shape in the real world. We’ve been doing this for a while at Catch because we believe it is vital to their ongoing education. I’m proud to say we’re formalizing it into our ongoing processes by issuing a document called “EIT Mentorship Procedure”, which shows our commitment to our people and values.”
It Starts at the Top
Of course, what Ilych just described is only possible with the support and vision of the Catch leadership team.
Changes like this have to start with the folks up top in order to be successful. Not only does leadership buy-in help make organization-wide efforts like this effective, but getting the C-suite to walk the walk and talk the talk goes a long way toward making these sorts of cultural initiatives stick.
“The culture here at Catch starts with the leadership team and trickles down from there – to the junior team members, support staff, and everyone,” Ilych explained. “Every project we work on has a project manager and an executive sponsor so that there are always two points of contact between senior team members and clients for that all-important transfer of knowledge to occur. This also gives us a chance to bring those junior team members into the process so that they can start to learn how our culture and values apply to our day-to-day work. This effort translates into building up junior employees to eventually take on similar projects more independently in the future, helping them grow their skills and helping Catch expand its bandwidth all at once.”
It’s that last point that Ilych starts to make – exploring how this mentor-centric approach to culture translates into actual, tangible business results – that brings it all home for us. After all, with six core competencies to demonstrate to APEGA in order to become a Professional Engineer (technical; communication; project and financial management; team effectiveness; professional accountability; and social, economic, environmental, and sustainability) and the need for references and validators to speak to a grasp of those competencies, the notion of mentorship goes hand-in-glove with the EIT process.
Let’s dig in a bit deeper.
Benefits to the Business
Catch’s focus on investing in its junior team members does more than just work toward advancing employees’ career ambitions; it ultimately positions the business to be more sustainably successful over the long term.
By building a team of up-and-coming talent just as savvy and sharp as the old guard that came before, Catch is essentially creating a group of all-star engineers, with every member being as innovative and impactful in their role as the last. Of course, there are heavy hitters on the team who bring business benefits through their breadth of experience – but by approaching business culture with a focus on mentorship, Catch has set up a unique and desirable scenario for itself.
Not only is the Catch team more capable of taking on more work due to a more knowledgeable and skilled team – one in which juniors punch above their weight thanks to the investment senior team members and leadership have made in them – but it’s also set up to ensure that success is sustainable even beyond the tenure of crucial team members and leaders.
“Investing in our people, empowering those who have helped us find success to find further success of their own, that’s the Catch Difference. It’s just the way we do business,” Ilych concluded – and business, as they say, is booming as a result.
Gratitude goes out to Dana Ilych for making the time to talk team mentorship and development with us today – thank you, Dana!
Looking to learn more about how an engineering team with a focus on skillset training and talent development can help lead your next project toward success? Contact us at Catch Engineering and discover the Catch Difference in partnering with our expert, people-centric team today.
