Growing from engineer to architect and thriving

As an architect, you have a much bigger impact with your technical leadership and enabling others, than just your own contribution.

Intro

This article is the next edition of “Which is the right engineering career path for you?”. This edition is particularly made for engineers to make good decisions regarding their career growth. Knowing in which direction to grow, will ensure you focus on learning the right things.

We are now moving towards the mindset and mentality of being an architect. When growing to the architect position it’s important to understand that you have a much bigger impact with your technical leadership and enabling others, than just your own contribution.

I’ve had the pleasure to interview Mike Thornton, Software Architect at Bluebeam. He has over 20 years of experience both as an engineer growing all the way to Principal level and as a Software Architect enabling various teams to be productive and successful.

We have talked about his overall motivation, typical day (week), how to tell that an engineer would be a great architect, his advice on what actions to take to grow to the architect position, t…