When I graduated from École Mohammadia d’Ingénieurs in 2010, I thought I had acquired a profession.
A degree in information systems, a contract waiting, and a clear path: engineer, then project manager, then whatever comes next on the familiar ladder. That’s how engineering is presented to us: a respectable profession, good income, a secure future.
It took me many years to understand that what I took from those years wasn’t a profession.
It was a way of seeing the world, a responsibility, and a way of life.
What did I actually learn in my engineering years?
If you had asked me on graduation day what I’d learned, I would have listed: databases, programming, systems design, project management.
Today, after a path that ran through IBM in Casablanca and Dubai, through running entrepreneurship programs in Laayoune, through fellowships in Washington and California, and then through building Impactedia with its brands and platforms, I see the real answer quite differently.
What I learned in engineering wasn’t the course content. I’ve forgotten most of it. What I learned were three habits of seeing that have never left me:
First: seeing the system behind the event. An engineer doesn’t ask “what happened?” but “what structure made this happen?”. A recurring failure isn’t bad luck; it’s a design that allows failure. That way of looking traveled with me from information systems to social programs: when I see an initiative stumble, I don’t look for someone to blame. I look for the structure.
Second: respecting the constraint. In engineering, the constraint is not the enemy. A limited budget, tight time, scarce resources. These aren’t obstacles to design; they are the very material of design. Later, when I worked with associations and youth initiatives running on modest means, I never saw scarcity as the end of the road. I saw it as the specifications of the problem.
Third: distinguishing what works from what appears to work. A beautiful model on paper means nothing before it’s tested. That habit later became an entire profession for me, called impact measurement: the difference between activity and outcome, between noise and change that is real, genuine, and authentic.
When I left technology and it didn’t leave me
In 2015 I left IBM. On the surface, I left engineering: from a global technology company to youth empowerment programs in Laayoune, then to social entrepreneurship, then to impact measurement and institutional storytelling.
For years I introduced myself with a slight hesitation: “former engineer.” As if engineering were a station I had passed.
Then I noticed something strange: everything I built after IBM was engineering.
CitizenUp was engineering: a platform connecting citizens with volunteering opportunities, a system with clear inputs and outputs. The Laayoune programs were engineering: turning a vague ambition (“support 400 young people”) into dashboards, milestones, and evaluation. And Impactedia itself is engineering: we take something that seems unmeasurable, social impact, and build it systems of proof, narrative, and growth.
I never left engineering. I only left its subject. I used to engineer information systems; I came to engineer impact systems.
The difference between a profession and a way of seeing
Here is the distinction I need to offer anyone standing before a career transition:
A profession is what you do for pay. It changes, it ends, and you can lose it.
A way of seeing is what remains when the profession changes. It’s the deep layer that travels with you from field to field, growing stronger with every transition instead of weaker.
Most of the anxiety I’ve seen in people considering a change of path, and lived myself, comes from confusing the two layers. We think that when we leave the profession, we lose all its years. The truth is that those years weren’t only building the profession. They were building the eye that sees.
The engineer who becomes a teacher doesn’t stop being an engineer; he becomes a teacher who sees the classroom as a system. The doctor who moves into management carries the diagnostic gaze. Your early years are never lost, if you know what they truly built in you.
A question for you
If you’re at a moment of transition, or you fear your past years went without meaning, try this exercise:
Don’t ask “what was I doing?”. Ask: “how did those years teach me to see?”
Write down three habits of seeing you took from your first field. Then look at the field you’re moving toward and ask: where does this field need an eye like mine?
Most often, you’ll find that what you thought was a break in the path was its extension. The intention gets rephrased, the profession gets renamed, but the way of seeing remains, accumulates, and becomes, with time, your own distinct impact that resembles no one else’s.
Engineering wasn’t my profession. It was, and still is, my way of seeing the world…
