Self-actualization is an uncomfortable idea. It asks you to stop measuring your progress against someone else's map. But do you ever stop to ask yourself, “Am I growing more fully into myself?"
That question sat at the center of a recent conversation among three engineers who had to answer it honestly. What emerged was not a series of success stories, but a clearer picture of what growth looks like: less linear and more honest.
Letting Go of the Perfect Plan
There is a particular kind of pressure that follows ambitious people early in their careers. It is the pressure of the plan. Five years, ten years, a clear trajectory from where you are to where you are supposed to want to be. Engineering is not immune to this. If anything, a field built on precision and problem-solving can make the absence of a clear answer feel like failure.
Syeda, a product manager specializing in amplifier technology, spent years trying to resolve this tension before arriving at a reframe that changed how she worked.
When the next milestone becomes everything, we miss the growth already underway and the moments that feel most like stagnation are often, in hindsight, the most formative. What accumulates in those seasons rarely appears on a resume: the ability to sit with uncertainty, to lead through ambiguity, to continue when the path is unclear. These are not “just soft skills," as Syeda puts it. They are “the foundation of what makes us great leaders and great engineers."
The Skills You Didn't Know You Were Building
Ekaterina came to software engineering from law. At first glance, the two fields did not seem to share much in common. Yet, over time, the overlap became clear. Law had trained her to navigate ambiguity, bring structure to uncertainty, and work through problems without clean answers. These were not peripheral skills. They were central to engineering. What seemed like a departure revealed itself as a translation.
That realization also dismantled a belief she once carried, one that remains persistent in technical environments. “I used to believe that to be a good engineer, you need to have some sort of natural predisposition," she reflects. Over time, she arrived at a simpler conclusion.
Skills accumulate across domains and often grow stronger in new contexts. What looks like starting over is frequently leverage.
Community as Infrastructure
Growth rarely happens in isolation. The engineers who move furthest are almost always the ones who invested in relationships alongside craft, who sought guidance deliberately rather than waiting for it to appear.
Nadia has built her career across three industries: maritime, aeronautical, and automotive. Each transition required her to enter rooms where she was an outsider and to find or build the connections that would help her contribute. What she learned is that mentorship is not passive. It does not simply arrive.
Skills accumulate across domains and often grow stronger in new contexts. What looks like starting over is frequently leverage.
Waiting to be noticed is not a strategy. Actively seeking guidance is. It's important to assert that your development is worth investing in – and acknowledging that you can play an important part in someone else's development.
“If you're a woman with experience, you can offer your time and be that person for someone else, because we all have something to give and something to learn." This is how cultures change. The engineers who were helped along the way and who help others in return are the ones quietly reshaping what the profession looks like.
The Mold and What It Costs
Engineering, like most professions, can carry assumptions about who belongs and how they should show up.
For Syeda, that translated into feeling misaligned with the dominant image of the profession, until she reached a turning point and recognized that “my differences weren't things that I needed to hide. They were actually my biggest strengths." The ability to think across disciplines, to connect technical and strategic problems, to lead with both rigor and empathy are not soft additions to engineering capability. As she puts it, it is about giving yourself “permission to bring your whole self to the table."
Ekaterina sees the mold as more than a coincidence. Historically, women and men have often been guided – whether intentionally or unintentionally – toward different areas of study, influencing who enters the profession in the first place. In that sense, today's representation reflects long-standing educational patterns rather than active exclusion.
For Nadia, the mold appeared early. As a teenager in a tools workshop, she remembers being asked whether she worried about damaging her manicure, something that “never crossed my mind until that moment," but one that revealed how assumptions are formed long before careers begin. What she learned over time is that assumptions can be changed. In her words, “Asking questions, setting boundaries and showing what you can do can really shift the conversation."
Permission
One word surfaced repeatedly across this conversation, and it is not one that typically appears in professional language. Permission. The permission to not have everything figured out. To be seen growing rather than only presenting a finished version.
Each of these engineers has had to extend that permission to herself at different moments in her career. What they found was not a final form of confidence or clarity, but something more useful: the willingness to be seen still in progress. Not waiting to arrive. Just building.
The conversation, hosted by the HARMAN Women Network during Engineers Week, reflected something larger than a single panel. It underscored an ongoing commitment at HARMAN to build a culture where engineers at every stage of their careers feel seen and encouraged to keep evolving.
