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

e14 Question of the Month

New graduates, budding engineers or early career professionals can benefit from some sound career advice by experienced engineers. But what advice is the best to give them? Vote in this poll to tell the community what you think is the best advice to give young engineers.

dang74 over 2 years ago

I voted do projects at home / have electronics as a hobby. I admit that this might not be the shortest path to 'enrichment' but over time it will certainly bear fruits.
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DAB over 2 years ago in reply to robogary

Agreed.

I started a tech aide program where we would bring in promising college students.

The program enabled me to mentor them into full time positions.
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DAB over 2 years ago in reply to dougw

Yes, it was essential to keep up with the mail.

Now that I am retired, I get very little mail.

I do not miss it.
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DAB over 2 years ago in reply to dougw

I agree, stay as broad as you can, it provides many opportunities.
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dougw over 2 years ago

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.
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dougw over 2 years ago in reply to DAB

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.
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battlecoder over 2 years ago

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.
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DAB over 2 years ago in reply to dougw

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.
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robogary over 2 years ago

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.
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dougw over 2 years ago

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