Question of Month: Advice for young engineers wanting to expand their knowledge?

While we all want to say "All of the above", you don't know what you don't know - and the communities help address that.

During university, participate as a volunteer in any association where you learn to organize events, build teams, do development cooperation projects, encourage primary and secondary students towards STEM careers, network and, above all, have a good time.

In the working world, volunteer to help seniors with any task you know nothing about, even if it is tedious and boring, and learn and grasp everything the senior offers you.

I voted for 'Read electronics design publications' but really its all of them.

Definitely you should spend as much time as you can picking the brains of other people. I think that one of the huge disadvantages of working from home is that you miss out on opportunities to learn new stuff from colleagues. Almost everything I know about machining and mechanical design I picked up from  other people at work because it was never my actual job. But the knowledge I've gained has been very useful.

MK

Try hard to stay abreast of trends in the industry, especially try hard to get ready for the ubiquitous impacts of AI and metaverses.

Identify a couple mentors at work. At least one respected engineer , with skills and attitude you would like to emulate. Another respected engineer who is the leader or manager one to three levels higher who can mentor you on vision and help you with company sponsored training, bubble assignments, paid schooling, professional associations and networking. 

This is an important part of being an engineer.

At my peak, I was reading 60 technical journals a month.

It took a lot of time, but it kept me up to date on what was available.

It definitely should be "all of them" but I picked "Do projects at home". I want to emphasize that all of the options are great, but the knowledge that tends to stick, in my case at least, is the one that I've been able to apply. And normally my drive to "expand" my knowledge always comes from an idea or a project.

And in most cases is from projects made at home, at my own pace, on my own terms. Unless you are lucky enough to get a job right out of the gate that challenges you to learn new things and gives you the space and tools and time to tackle them while you learn, then it's going to be your personal projects that do more of the knowledge expansion for you.

Also, the question mentions expanding "skills" as well, and improving skills normally requires practice and not just advice or tips from the community or books or publications. They can definitely help you build skills, but you can't claim to be a "skilled" PCB designer, for example, if you've never designed a single PCB, no matter how many articles, forum posts or books you've read on PCB design.

Before the Internet, I was receiving a stack of snail mail about 1 foot high every day. I find it hard to comprehend now, how I got through it all every day, even though I remember staying a few hours late every day just to read mail.

Doing projects at home allows you to keep to to date on useful industry trends, regardless of whether your company happens to need this for its product development. If you get too specialized, your career choices become limited.

I agree, stay as broad as you can, it provides many opportunities.