Career Learnings Directory
A directory of contributor repos in the second-hand-tigers organization focused on career and non-technical professional development — as distinct from the discipline-based project repos (like chem-eng-projects) that focus on technical project execution.
Where to Start
| 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 |
|---|---|
| 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 |
Contributor Career Paths and Timelines
| Contributor | Personal Overview | Career Timeline | Career Learnings Hub |
|---|---|---|---|
| William Docter, Ph.D. | Who is Dr. Docter? | Dr. Docter’s Career Timeline | Dr. Docter’s Learnings |
(This list will grow as more experienced engineers join the network. See Building Your Own Career-Learnings Network Repo and Wiki for how these repos are structured — including if you want to replicate the pattern for your own organization.)
Why Two Kinds of Content
Project work and career development happen in parallel, not in sequence — you’re building a project and building a career at the same time, and most people find themselves more pulled toward one than the other at any given moment. That’s expected, not a problem to fix.
The project repos and the career-learnings repos in this org are built to be complementary, not sequential: start wherever you’re actually interested, get enough value out of it, and — when you’re ready — the other kind of content is right there. A senior close to graduation and focused on landing a full-time offer might get more immediate value from career content than the next project milestone; someone deep in a design project might not think about career development until a mentor’s page happens to catch their eye. Either path in is a good one.
License: © 2026 William Docter and Second-Hand Tigers. 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 Second-Hand Tigers and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.