What is Kim Porter's advice for early-career engineers choosing their first job?
Kim Porter's core warning is direct: entry-level engineers who accept a first job without researching whether it aligns with their interests risk being pigeonholed — potentially for years. A mechanical engineer who wants to work in consumer electronics but spends two or three years at an automobile company will find it very difficult to pivot afterward. Her prescription is to identify your target industry before you start applying, not after.
To help engineers clarify what that target should actually be, Porter recommends a concrete exercise: write three to five short stories about moments of genuine childhood joy — specific memories from between the ages of 6 and 10. The key step is then to go back through those stories and underline the action verbs. The recurring verbs, she argues, reveal the underlying professional purpose that will genuinely engage you over a long career. The goal is to surface the type of work that feels natural and energizing rather than guessing based on salary or prestige.
Porter speaks from four decades of engineering experience, nearly all of it navigating environments where she was the only woman in the room. That context makes her advice practical rather than aspirational: early career choices create a professional identity that is genuinely hard to undo. Picking the wrong industry first is not just an inconvenience — it is a constraint that compounds. You can hear her explain the full reasoning on Listenly.
"No opinions, all data, no emotion. Here's the data, here are the results, this is my recommendation — and then you don't say anything. Silence is power."
— Kim Porter, episode 452 of Ordinary To BadassAbout Kim Porter
Kim Porter earned an engineering science and mechanics degree with an emphasis in biomedical engineering from Iowa State University in the early 1980s — at a time when biomedical engineering was not yet a recognized field of study. Within one month of the January 1986 Challenger disaster, she joined the project developing next-generation spacesuit gloves, beginning a career defined by high-stakes, technically demanding work. She subsequently moved into product design at Nike before building her own independent consultancy, Kim Porter Consultancy, which she ran for the majority of her career.
For nearly all of her 40 years in engineering, Porter was the sole woman in every room she worked in — a ratio that reflects the stubborn 1-in-10 gender split in mechanical engineering that has barely shifted since she was a student. She founded HatchOne, an online engineering community that includes a dedicated Women in Engineering subgroup, with the explicit mission of teaching the next generation the career and professional skills that no one taught her. She has recently retired from full-time engineering work while continuing to lead HatchOne and her consultancy. That biography — four decades of firsthand experience in overwhelmingly male environments, across aerospace, consumer products, and independent consulting — is what gives her career advice on industry selection its particular authority.
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After reading a job ad in the New York Times for a biomechanics engineer, Porter applied to a company that held the contract to manufacture and design next-generation spacesuit gloves — a role that put her at the center of the post-Challenger recovery effort within weeks of graduating.
Porter advises eliminating phrases like "I think" and "I believe" from professional vocabulary entirely, calling them self-undermining. Instead, she recommends leading with data, stating results clearly, and making a direct recommendation — then saying nothing more.
Porter describes her imposter syndrome as following a downward trajectory like a declining stock market over time. Early in her career she internalized it more deeply, but decades of documented results gradually eroded its hold on her sense of professional legitimacy.