William Docter — Career Learnings
Welcome. This repo holds career-development content I’ve built and taught over many years as a practicing chemical engineer — the non-technical skills that most early-career engineers don’t realize they need until they’re missing one.
Where to Start
This site is a companion to the full wiki, where every topic lives as its own page.
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| Making the Most of College | Co-op, extracurriculars, undergrad research, and grad school — the choices that shape your career long before the job hunt. Start here if you are still in school! |
| The Job Hunt | Resumes, LinkedIn, and Interview Prep — writing the documents and working the room. Start here if you are looking for a job! |
| The Renaissance Engineer | The Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, Technical (LBIT) career stage and development framework, mentoring across a career, and the “Sliced Bread” patent case study. Start here if you have already secured a position and are looking to hit the ground running and take the next steps |
| The Needs of the Many | The same development, staffing, and communication material above, gathered for whoever is now responsible for someone else’s growth and workload. Start here if you are a manager or leader |
| Workplace Communication | Communication & Marketing, presentations and public speaking, Bottom Line Up Front, and other workplace-writing pages |
Other Topics
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| Who is Dr. Docter? | Background, career path, personality/strengths profile (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) / Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS)) |
| Dr. Docter’s Career Timeline | Full year-by-year chronology of roles and responsibilities |
| Above the Line | Personal resilience story, practical coping strategies, and balancing team Full Time Equivalent (FTE) capacity against workload |
| Pop Culture Career Lessons | Nine films and shows — from Han Solo and Nedry to Neo and the Dread Pirate Roberts — as career-lesson vehicles |
This repo is part of the second-hand-tigers organization’s contributor network — a collection of individual repos where experienced engineers share what they’ve learned outside the technical curriculum. See the career learnings directory
Why This Exists
Technical skill gets you in the door. What determines how far you go — how you’re perceived, how you navigate ambiguity, how you build trust with people who aren’t engineers — is rarely taught in school and rarely formally taught on the job either, leaving a lot of it to the “school of hard knocks” to acquire, which at times can be brutal. This repo is my attempt to close that gap for the next generation, drawn from real experience rather than generic career advice.
How This Repo Is Organized
- Wiki — Contains wiki pages for all topics listed in the tables above.
- Issues / Projects — My working backlog of topics to develop or revise, tracked by status (Idea → Drafting → Delivered).
- /slides — PowerPoint decks from the actual talks/lectures this content is drawn from, organized by topic subfolder.
About Me
I spent 27 years at ExxonMobil, nearly all of it in Real Time Optimization — the discipline that sits at the intersection of process control, flowsheet modeling, economics, and automation. I started at Exxon Research and Engineering in the U.S., and spent my career doing RTO deployments and revamps through multi-year on-site assignments in the U.S., the U.K., and Belgium, plus remote support and shorter visits that took the same work to Japan, Australia, France, and Canada. The back half of my career shifted increasingly toward mentoring the next generation and building succession plans rather than just solving the technical problem in front of me. Along the way: a patent, several multi-million-dollar value-capture wins, and a lot of hard-won lessons about the non-technical side of the job that nobody ever handed me a syllabus for.
I hold a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Lehigh University and a B.S. from the University of Cincinnati. I retired from ExxonMobil in 2026 and now volunteer with chemical engineering senior design students at Lamar University — this repo is where that effort lives. Full details are on the Who is Dr. Docter? wiki page.
License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.