How does confidentiality policy affect you in you work place?

Asanti:

I do not know the context in which you are asking your confidentiality question. So I can only answer you in terms of my own experience of working as a Civil Engineer for more than 40 years in consulting firms. In general, most fields of engineering rarely involve using secret methods and so I never really experienced this aspect. In the latter half of my career, I was involved in pursuing numerous project opportunities. In these instances, our marketing team always faced competition from other firms. So we were quite careful to NOT disclose any marketing strategies or project approaches to our competitors.

With an engineering career, you will almost always be required to sign an agreement stating that the Firm will own any copyrights that may result from the work you do for the Company. This always seemed fair to me, given that the Firm was paying me for my work.

A couple of times during my career, I did environmental work for a military organization. In these cases I was required to obtain a SECRET Clearance and to not disclose any information deemed by the military to be Classified. This aside, I can tell you that confidentiality policies never had a substantial influence on my career or the work I performed.

I hope this helps, Pete Sturtevant PE

I'm a retired mechanical engineer working in the chemical industry and have been the engineering manager for almost thirty years. Almost from the start you may be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement because the company that you are working for does not want their technology to be stolen. Breaking a confidentiality agreement to join a new company is not good because it shows the new company that you cannot be trusted. If you are working on a new product or technology you will inevitably be exposed to company know-how. Generally the company (lawyers) will go over what is sensitive, but if you are in doubt ...what you can find on the internet and what is considered good industry practice does not usually fall under confidentiality. In the chemical industry there are many confidential process and formulas that keep one company ahead of others. When we visited other companies to purchase and technology leaders we wished to incorporate into our process, we had to sign confidentiality. The type of industry you wish to work in will determine how many times you will have to sign a confidentiality agreement. Civil and mechanical maybe the engineering sectors with the least use of confidentiality and Chemical and aerospace engineering being the most. Engineering knowledge is very valuable especially if you work for a technology leader. Consider it a privilege and don't squander the knowledge. If you change jobs, you can bring your general knowledge with you, but don't steal technology formulas or recipes. Good luck.