STEMUP
STEMUP
(OP)
Over the next five years, with more and more engineers, I see movement towards a more advanced, yet practical avenue called STEMUP: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Unemployment Preparation.
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RE: STEMUP
RE: STEMUP
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RE: STEMUP
... to me.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: STEMUP
It seems that the old school guys still need to work to secure their future after retirement if there is such a thing. And what does it profit them to teach younger guys their craft and lose their top dog stature and pay grade. That is not necessarily the business model I was exposed to but that is the reality as I see it. In fact there were a few old school guys laid off recently at my former company. 41 year experience, 30 years experience, and 14 years experience with the same company. With the lesser experience having 15 years more elsewhere. Now it could very well be due to the still poor economy where they are located or poor business practices.
I think the old school companies will/have been facing difficult times adjusting with their old school mentalities and business practices in spite of newer technologies that expedite the work process. The younger guys they trained or they had trained with newer technology understand there is a much better way to perform the work process with less overhead and either leave on their on accord to do this own their own or get removed from the situation and decide to do it on their own.
The lack of a thriving economy hurt them all but who do you think it hurt worse?
RE: STEMUP
I'm sorry and disappointed that you think that. I could, and do, mentor and teach younger engineers, because when I retire, they are the ones that have to carry the burden. I have no fear of losing my "top dog" stature, since it took decades to get to my state of experience, and few, if any, younger engineers can get to that level with just the help I give them.
And as for terminations and layoffs, just blowing away only younger engineers is rarely done, if for nothing else than the self interest of the person(s) doing the layoffs. Older engineers tend to be more specialized, and if the business is no longer aligned with their skills, what could possibly be the motivation to keep them suck at the corporate teat if they're no longer contributing to the bottom line? And that's the key, the "bottom line." If a manager cannot clearly see how a layoff affects the bottom line or contract performance, then they're in the wrong position.
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RE: STEMUP
However the corporate teet suckers do exists and were very bad at my old company. There simply were no younger empolyees that would stay. I was probably the first young grad that had stayed beyond a year or two in a long time. The younger previously experienced ones also seemed to leave after a short time and more than once started their own companies. We joked that the company was an Administrative company rather than an engineering company because lots of Administrative people there made more than a few of us.
They laid off three upper level managers this year at the same time as mentioned previously and they did the same probably about five years ago again with long time management employees. And it was not just that company. The second company I worked for had a revolving door for all staff/management for the most part regardless of the economy.
And it is true if your expecting to come out of school making what is advertised as starting engineering salaries companies probably can't afford to train you. I was making very little as a new grad and for the 9 years that followed so my learning on the job was not that expensive for my company.
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And yes some schools only teach it at the MS level, but several teach it at the BS level.
Someone said that teachers don't know enough about what they are teaching, and it's true. It's hard to find people who want to teach after being in an industry for many years.
Some industries do move fast, and people need to keep there skills up. But other industries don't move so fast, and learning on the job over the years is important.
After all not all industries are rocket science.
RE: STEMUP
- Did you get your degree by memorizing things, or you actually understand what you are doing?
- Do you have your problem-solving skills ready? Good engineers do.
- Are you able and willing to learn, form taking small CAD classes to going back to school?
- Are you open-minded, ready to accept that things may be done completely different way?
- Are you still curious, as in asking "how does it work?", "can I do that?". "I think I could do it better"?
You must keep your skill set and attitude flexible and you may be able not only find your next job faster, but possibly avoid unemployment altogether.Just ¢2
"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future
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Absolutely spot on. This holds true in any skilled profession, and the more intelligent bosses and managers hopefully realize the value that they are getting when it comes time for not only lay-offs, but for advancements, as well.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
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"Employment of civil engineers is projected to grow 20 percent from 2012 to 2022, faster than the average for all occupations. As infrastructure continues to age, civil engineers will be needed to manage projects to rebuild bridges, repair roads, and upgrade levees and dams."
I can't think of a more "general X" engineering degree than civil engineering.
Also, I see a lot of room for replacement of senior engineers as they age. Even if they stick around for a few more years, they will need to leave or dial back eventually, leaving a lot of opportunity for young engineers under 40 and especially under 30.
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A growth rate of 20% in 8 years is barely above the demographic growth rate in the U.S. If it's above the expected growth rate for all occupations, that is because so many of them are in massive decline.
The reality of the situation is, we've been generating more engineers in the U.S. And Canada than the market can use as engineers by a large margin, and in Canada the steady state is 30% of eng grads working as engineers- a lower match rate than any other profession. Not all of the ones who leave the profession or never enter it are CEOs or patent lawyers. On average, they earn 20% less than the ones working as engineers.
If engineering is what you love, and live, then get into a good school preferably with co op and strive to be in the top third or higher in your class. You will be fine. If you're doing well, you'll encourage others to follow the same path, decades later- in ignorance of or perhaps even in spite of the stats- that is what I see engineers do time and again.
If you're vaguely good in math and science and don't know what to pursue in university, my advice is to stay clear of engineering if you think it's in short supply- it absolutely is not. Then again, staying clear of general science would also be good advice. The STEM crisis is a myth, but that doesn't mean all hope is lost. It just means you cannot count on an education automatically guaranteeing the employment it purportedly prepares you for, despite the hype. In Canada, anything related to medicine still has the best match rates between education and employment- upwards of 80-90%. Every other regulated profession puts more of its grads to work in their chosen fields than engineering does. Even teaching, which is oversupplied to miserable levels, manages to employ a fraction of its graduate candidates twice as high as engineering does here- and at a pay level similar to what engineers earn once vacation is accounted for.
RE: STEMUP
For chemical engineers, maybe the outlook is not so good:
"Employment of chemical engineers is projected to grow 4 percent from 2012 to 2022, slower than the average for all occupations. Demand for chemical engineers’ services depends largely on demand for the products of various manufacturing industries."
So, if not engineering,than what? I suppose nothing in life is guaranteed, is it?
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Plenty of factors involved. Personality, salesperson ability and others I'm sure I'm not aware of yet, or maybe I'm not willing to tell you about yet. I certainly never thought about being a salesperson when I was going to school but apparently that is a important part of life.
Another aspect is, I have to feed my family. I don't have that privilege myself but it obviously exists if you do. Got to watch out for people that do and I can't blame them. Just not there with them. Best to know the possibility though. Bit me in the ass before. Watch who you joke with. or better yet don't joke at all.
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If you haven't read this article yet, you must- especially if you believe that there is any current or pending shortage of any kind of STEM occupation, especially engineering.
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"Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. "
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RE: STEMUP
If there's one statement that encapsulates my employment experience since 2003, it's a quote from the STEM Crisis is a Myth article.
"In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts."
That's really where engineering has gone and is going, based on my experience.
RE: STEMUP
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RE: STEMUP
Maybe it is that way for some engineers, but not all of us.
Yes I can see PhD's driving taxis, as I have seen engineers that just don't get it, or pick it up. The text book is not always correct. And to that, the text books in my field are written by professors who have never done the work. The few books written by working engineers, sadly don't make any money.
The sad truth is marketing is where the money is. Everyone remembers Steve Jobs, but what of the technical guy?
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What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
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The H1B issue is its own issue. And there is a demographic shift coming. Boomers who hid from Vietnam in school are retiring. The glut of engineers is coming to an end.
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That's what employers want: a steady supply of "flexible labour"- well trained entirely at the cost of others, willing to accept substandard conditions, remote locations, poor pay etc., to relocate at their own cost etc. etc. That's an employers' Shangri La. But it is a disaster for our profession- and isn't in the national economic interest either.
I've been hearing about this supposed "demographic shift" end-of-the-world shortage of engineers scenario for at least fifteen years. What is really happening is that people are delaying retirement because mandatory retirement was conveniently and silently disposed of. Young engineers are still screwed. In Canada, our eng grads still overwhelmingly want to work as engineers when they graduate (consistently, when surveyed, more than 90% of 4th year eng students indicate they either definitely or probably will work as engineers on graduation), and yet less than 50% of them end up in eng jobs- and on average (all eng grads local and foreign-educated) only about 30% of eng grads here work as engineers or engineering managers in our country. That number has been falling steadily for the past two decades with nary a hiccup in its steady decline. That's a result of an engineering supply glut so massive that no amount of "demographic shift" will ever meaningfully touch it, much less erase it.
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The other problem is many young engineers don't want to read the old text books, and would rather Google for the easy way to do things. I feel that will start to show up in more outages until the problems are learned into the younger engineers. But that will only make the NERC reporting worse, and will require even more engineers to do the paper work.
So as a power system engineer, I have to ask why my PC is so much less reliable than the computers we use in the substations, or in cars?
There is a big need for PC reliability engineers.
RE: STEMUP
Who really WANTED to read textbooks, whether old or new? No one I know. Internet search has become the most efficient means of finding information quickly in many cases. You can't blame an engineer for wanting to use his/her time most effectively and arrive at a solution with minimal effort. That sounds like efficiency to me.
That said, I get it that hard won knowledge is remembered better than a bit of trivia you looked up once. I still don't think that fast access to information is going to make younger engineers less effective.
I think a much bigger problem is that too many engineers are kept chained to a desk in a cubicle with little field experience of the industry. A lot more of the old timers I've worked with had spent time with operations, maintenance, end users, construction, etc. giving them more perspective on the job.
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Of course not. If that wasn't allowed, then everyone should go back to using slide rules, because you're more likely to understand the calculations when you do it manually. The adage about standing on the shoulders of giants holds true. Would engineers really want to burn their copies of Roark so that they can derive the deflection equations from scratch? Do we stop using simulation and FEA tools because we've lost the "feel" for the equations? No company cares that much whether you can derive the equations from scratch or look them up. What they do care about is productivity; how many beams can you design per week, etc.
These sentiments were probably expressed when slide rules replaced log tables, when calculators replaced slide rules, when simulation tools replaced hand calculations, etc., Every generation could and should benefit from the tools that make them more productive and able to design things that couldn't possibly be designed by hand. Can anyone imagine designing Taipei 101 by hand calculations or even with programmable calculators?
I've no intention on dumping Mathcad and doing unit conversions by hand; that's a very manual process that's very prone to errors. Just think of all the time we save by not having to recheck calculations because we know with 100% confidence that Mathcad or Excel is doing the algebra correctly and won't transpose digits or misplace a decimal place or not spending hours looking for a mistake that turned out to be an inverted unit conversion?
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RE: STEMUP
I am also concerned by the easy answers that so many young engineers in my field come up with, and they don't understand the problems that are being created for what they are doing.
It's easy to take a number from the computer and plug it into a real time device, but what does it mean? Under what conditions will it not work correctly? How does this need to be tested in the field?
The old phrase that "it's unlikely to happen" is what gets people killed.
RE: STEMUP
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RE: STEMUP
My experience is that foreigners have a very difficult time landing Civil Engineering jobs because the practice is so local and communication skills are VERY important - perhaps more important that technical ability in some cases. I have an H1B Visa holder on my staff, but she is particularly exceptional. Most I have seen are typically mediocre candidates at best, pHD or not.
What are other engineers in the civil sector (civil, struct, geo, etc.) seeing?
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I think that a lot of the old text are good for explaining why something was done. Understanding why something was done a certain way I think is more important than the final chosen solution. Googling how to carry out a very specific task probably works most of the time but it leads to a lot of unnecessary garbage that carries over from project to project and/or the engineering being overly conservative. From my experience, at large EPCs you hear comments like "I don't know why it was done this way but just copy it for this project" often. A lot of copy and paste engineering going on at some places.
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The excuse that this is how we did it on the last job, just dos not cut it with me. We hired an engineer, not a drafter.
I have a case now where an engineer wants to go from an overhead line, underground to a protective way switch, then back overhead to the transformer bushings. When asked why he wanted to do it that way, he said that is how we did the last job. He dosen't seem to understand the last job was with an underground line, and we just replaced the switch, not added a new one.
I thought we learned in first grade how to see the difference between two pictures, but he did not go to school in the US (Excuse me while I fume).
We as engineers should be able to think out side the box, and that means that not all boxes look alike.
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I think a fundamental problem that contributes to the copy & paste operation is a lack of experience/perspective. If you've only ever seen it done one way, or never really been involved at all, how can you conceptualize a good solution without reinventing the wheel? It's a big ask if you want someone to go from basic science through code compliance and economic viability to reach a finished design.
If trying to think inside or outside the box, newbies don't really know where the boundaries of the box are. So, if you ask a newbie to design something, the smart ones are going to look for similar things to copy. If they're really good, they'll start asking for help and suggestions rather than just presenting a copy & paste as finished.
So how do you solve the desire to copy & paste? I think experience is going to be the best teacher. If people are retained for more than just the project duration they can learn more than just what it takes to find the answer/solution. Of course, this paragraph is just a wish. I don't have the power to change employee retention rates; at least not by much. A goal without a plan is a wish.
RE: STEMUP
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RE: STEMUP
RE: STEMUP
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RE: STEMUP
1) Much of this thread reads like old people talking about the old days while they play shuffleboard. If you give a new grad a task and don't give them guidance, they're going to try to find something to learn from, and that's the "copy paste" that you're complaining about. But the problem occured before the copy paste - you gave a squeaky new grad a problem without enough guidance, and they're worried about asking you questions without making an attempt at it first. If they came to you with dozens of questions without trying first, you'd complain. When they make a go of it first, you complain too! No making old people happy, I guess.
Try having a little empathy from the perspective of the inexperienced, eager to please, scared to piss you off new grad.
2) Unemployment/Underemployment in engineering IS a big deal. And instead of snarking about it, the current generation of engineers should be doing something to solve it by establishing mentorships, promoting the hiring and training of new grads (getting a real engineering job as a new grad today is hugely difficult), etc . Instead, engineers are going to go the other way and make it more difficult for graduating engineers to become engineers by requiring masters level courses (not masters degrees, just masters level course ?!) just to disqualify those who want to work after getting their bachelors.
This is a huge failing of the existing engineering profession, and its going to get worse. You want to talk about bringing shame to the engineering profession? It's not from dumb graduates, its from the actions of the senior/experienced engineers who want to make the undergraduate engineering degree essentially useless.
3) With all that engineering graduates are pursuing and gaining employment in other fields because employers know that engineering graduates are willing to learn and work hard. I think I read that in canada (where I'm from) the % of graduates who get engineering jobs is only 30%. But engineering bodies are NOT doing anything about it. In the future what is a glut of engineers will turn into serious lack when enrollment falls due to undergraduate engineering being worthless ("oh you're going to need a masters, so you might as well see if there's anything else that interests you") and some of you older folks start retiring.
Maybe you guys can come up with some other things to discourage new grads from becoming engineers. Unpaid internships next? Increase EIT times to 10 years? Snark about it the whole time?
This is serious stuff to the younger generation. STEMUP? I can tell you up where the younger guys want you to put the joking about their future.
RE: STEMUP
Some people just don't seem to have it. That's what seems to be missing in so many young engineers.
If you can't see what questions to ask, and must be given every step of the process, then I might as well do it myself. Why did I hire you?
The answer is to ask why, not how. The goal is think and develop the questions, then attempt to solve it, and along the way be asking is there a better way.
BTW: I have never played shuffleboard, nor do I know how to play, or do I have time.
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No, your issue is, or should be, with the employers of engineers- only some of whom are engineers themselves, mind you! They recklessly scream "shortage!" and the various levels of government respond with increases to both engineering school enrollments and engineering immigration. The universities respond to increased "demand", which they define as "students applying to their programs" rather than "employers hiring their graduates for what they've been trained for"- universities here think they're businesses with a growth motive, rather than public services who spend precious collective resources that could also be spent on a thousand other things our society needs.
It's not engineers themselves who are demanding that you get a Master's degree- it's employers who are responding to a buyer's market by setting the bar higher still.
The OP who started this thread wasn't making a joke: they were addressing a real problem in the profession that a lot of people have their heads in the sand about- or in even darker places. And they were doing it in a way which got attention. Good for them!
I'm an experienced engineer who has been gathering data and advocating in relation to this issue for over a decade. I've pounded my head against this wall for a long time. So be careful who you blast with your vitriol. I've been doing everything I can manage to bring attention to this issue, to inform the people at all levels in positions of power so they have the correct information upon which to make decisions. Many of them are still attempting to solve the problems of the 1950s and '60s, or are reacting to employer concerns that are based on a misunderstanding of the real situation. The first step in solving any problem is analyzing the problem and acknowledging that it's real.
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Why do you assume that's different now than any other time? This is the shuffleboard portion. What do you think happened to grads back in the day that didn't have the spark? Some didn't make it, some developed it, some found jobs that didn't require it. Just like today.
When you graduated did University prepare you for every task possible, or did your employer train you when you first started out? You hired someone who will in the future (hopefully) be perfect for the position you want. If you wanted someone who could already do your job without any training, you shouldn't have hired a new grad!
If someone doesn't know the how, I think I'd prefer they ask that too. It sounds to me like your expectations are the issue here - you hired a new grad and what you want is an intermediate engineer who has already done it all!
Yes and no. Obviously there are other actors here too, but the engineering bodies aren't doing anything to help either!
You know who has the power to protest this in a meaningful way? Not engineering students and new grads. Practicing licensed engineers are the people in the industry who have the most power and influence to work on this. Do you blame students for wanting to be engineers? Or new grads for wanting jobs? Universities graduate students - that what they do. They aren't going to decrease intake.
The ones in relatively secure positions with the expertise and some influence are the ones who should be acting.
Not true anymore.
http://blogs.asce.org/ncees-endorses-future-focuse...
http://www.asce.org/raise_the_bar/
It is the engineering bodies, made up of currently practicing engineers, who are increasing the academic requirements to become an engineer. To keep the protests to a minimum they're going to put an 8 year delay on the effect so that those in school now can get out, but the bottom line is that its the engineering bodies who are now going to require a masters degree. The value of the engineering undergraduate degree is going to plummet - it will be the "pre med school" of engineering.
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Doctors, pharmacists, CPA's, Lawyers all have higher education requirements and all get paid higher on average.
It might lend a little more respect and pay for those willing to run the gammet. Of course, I suppose I'd feel differently if I didn't have an engineering master's degree.
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Except that none of those require a particular undergraduate degree. They have specialized graduate degrees because for pharmacists and doctors any bachelor of science counts, and for a lawyer almost any undergraduate degree works. Then you get a specialized graduate degree with the specific education in your field, be it law, pharmacy, or medicine. It doesn't take 8 years to train a doctor in medicine, even though they're in school that long.
What is being done here in engineering is that you will require a specialized undergraduate degree, and then a non-specialized masters degree that really only adds difficulty and cost rather than some specific training thats been identified as lacking in engineering education. If they require a specific masters degree too that would be even more of a barrier to people becoming engineers, and far above and beyond what other professionals require.
On the surface those seem like decent parallels but when you actually look into the details you see that they are actually the reverse of the engineering system proposed.
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Heck, even with my bachelor's and master's in engineering, if I wanted to get a CPA, I'd have to go back and take a bunch of undergrad accounting and related classes before being at the same place as those who have a BS in accounting already.
Most folks without a master's would disagree with the validity of more education makes you more qualified. But then again, there are a bunch of people without degrees at all that claim there is sparse value a university education whatsoever. My father happens to be one of them. I respectfully disagree. And I also think the non-technical classes are just as important as the technical classes if you are purporting yourself to be a true professional.
And you are incorrect about the specialized bachelor's leading to generalized master's. It is absolutely opposite from that and unless you can support your claim, I have no reason believe universities are changing their policies. I graduated in 08 with my bachelor's so this is not coming from the shuffle board conversations. In fact, they forced us to increase our undergrad breadth rather than concentrating on say, structural.
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A masters degree in engineering, or 30 credits of eng, math, sci, and professional practice courses (ie a more generalized approach).
If the requirement is so loose as to allow an engineering masters, or just a bunch of related courses, then its really not about having some particular knowledge and really just about making the whole thing more onerous. "We're graduating too many engineers and we don't know how to get them all jobs without training them, so we're just going to put more random barriers in front of becoming a PE to protect it against people as qualified as we were when we graduated."
That's not coming from me, that's coming from the ASCE.
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Anyway, just finish your degree, make good grades and you will likely find a job. You'll be grandfathered in to the existing education requirements, so spend your energies being the best you rather than lamenting what awaits those behind you. Be glad that the barriers to entry are raised as your paycheck will also be raised.
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If it's a non-thesis master's degree, then it basically is just a bunch of related courses.
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We do see the same pressure here from the engineering regulatory bodies to increase the academic requirements for licensure. These same folks encourage increased engineering enrollment and expend a lot of energy recruiting kids into the profession. They fail to differentiate between the benefit of engineering to society (which is indisputable) from the benefit of engineering as a career choice (which is very disputable!) or the need for an increased supply of engineering graduates (which is beyond dispute- we are drowning in them already). That said, we see pressure in the opposite direction, to drop the experience and mentorship requirements from licensure for fear that it is acting as a barrier to licensure, and hence employment, for foreign-trained engineers and fresh grads. In my opinion, that would be an opportunity to take our flawed professional license and make it utterly and completely meaningless.
Absolutely, working engineers should be more diligent in carrying out their responsibilities to the next generation of engineers- in many, many ways. Our regulatory bodies fail us in this regard. To be fair, working professional engineers are suffering under the yoke of a regulatory environment which puts on them additional responsibilities arising from their title, without meaningful matching benefits arising from that title- and they are doing precious little to change that either. Here in Canada, and particularly in Ontario, a licensed professional engineer is granted no meaningful rights arising from their license, that do not require an additional "license" to take advantage of (i.e. a certificate of authorization), or cannot be obtained by a "legal" cheat of the system (i.e. by working in an industry considered "exempt", or for an employer with a C of A). So if you're concerned that the experienced engineers are failing in their duties toward the next generation of engineers, I'd argue that they are also failing in their duty to defend their own generation as well.
Regrettably, we engineers are too timid, and too concerned about perceived conflict of interest, to pursue our own self-interest through effective advocacy. So what we have here in Ontario is an advocacy body which stays silent about the oversupply of engineers to the marketplace (i.e. they are not doing any effective public communication on the matter, though they may be talking quietly and privately with various levels of government without mentioning this anywhere publicly), while at the same time advocating "continuing competency" requirements for people already having a license, and threatening students with refusal of admission to the advocacy body if their Frosh Week activities get out of line (a power they do not have). They don't understand their role- they think they're an extension of the regulatory body! I helped found that advocacy body, and am dismally disappointed in the result: it has utterly failed to live up to its mandate, though there have been a few hopeful signs along the way.
I don't blame students for seeking engineering as an educational choice. I blame educators and engineers both, for failing to point out in a meaningful way, that an engineering education is no longer any guarantee of an engineering job- and that those who seek an engineering education and do not end up with an engineering job, are not all patent lawyers and CEOs either. Most of those who fail to gain entry to our profession upon graduation, have not sought other employment by choice, but rather by default.
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Yes I did take several classes after I was employed, and they were only valuable after I had some time on the job.
And this young engineer I was ranting about. I did not hire him. He was hired into another department, because they wanted someone in the field more (I refuse to take family undertime pay).
The problem is the managers in the other department don't understand the job, so they don't know what questions to ask at the interview. This is the second engineer they hired, because the first one left after we would not allow him to purchase the latest (most costly, and difficult to work with) and greatest equipment.
If you can't learn the job on your own, then you need a different profession.
That said, I do work with a group of engineers, but each of us has a different skill set, so we don't overlap much on what we do (project, electrical, mechanical, structural, civil).
We don't have extra spaces for training positions, because of managment position constraints, and the little cross training we have just helps to make us all well rounded.
Maybe the drunken navy guys in the other department has training positions, but we don't (how they always have money for stupid things I don't understand).
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RE: STEMUP
RE: STEMUP
Most civil projects (including structural) are somewhat formulaic and there are a lot of standards of practice which vary by region that you simply could not know or learn on your own without being trained by someone with experience. Even a seasoned civil engineer would require some re-training if they decided to move to another region and practice in the same field. For example, pavement design is much different in California than in Texas. You could figure out DOT design as that is relatively codified, but private pavement wouldn't have anything more than "that's how we do it here" for one reason or another that evolved from years of pavement experience in that region. One thing I like about civil engineering is that there is a lot of knowledge that is handed down in a way that is almost impossible to be conveyed from books and just good problem solving skills. The calculated solution is often not the correct solution.
That said, a little baptism by fire, where appropriate, is good for you. Regardless of your field, you do need to learn to think on your own. I am a needy learner and one critique my bosses handed me after about 2 years was that when I came across something I wasn't sure about, have my best idea for a solution to accompany my question of what to do. I always do that now and it was more about confidence building than anything else. If my employer was hardcore about learning on your own with minimal support, I probably wouldn't have made it. But they nurtured me and I'm a department manager now. I wish I was a less needy learner....
RE: STEMUP
More education is nice, but I don't think that's a good answer. School is great for learning theories, but very often falls short on practical skills. The best prep for a real engineering job I had in school was Formula SAE. Yeah, race cars are cool, but it was the most realistic environment. There were schedules, budgets, problems, testing, lots of communication, physical stuff to build, and no 'correct answers'. Even that was just a small version of working on engineering projects.
Of course curmudgeonly attitudes about how much better things used to be are not helpful. However, if there were specific things that worked better in the past maybe they need to be reconsidered. What are these things?
As I see it, people used to stick around one job/company for longer periods. In so doing they would pick up more knowledge about that organization/industry naturally. With higher turnover we can't expect that sort of institutional knowledge to be easily transferred. I don't think that these sorts of learning can be taught in school. Schools (Universities included) are just too general, even at the Masters level.