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  • Author Author: Instructorman
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What career related skill would you most like to improve?

We all know that selecting a career in electronics means accepting a requirement to continuously upgrade skills and capabilities.  This requirement is also imposed on anyone that commits to learning electronics as a hobby.  Electronics is ever evolving with developments occurring on multiple fronts - Internet of Things is one contemporary example.  To stay relevant in this field means learning new skills.

 

Over the 36 years of my career in electronics I have been involved in hiring many technologists, instructors, engineers, interns, and research staff.  I've also been involved in a few firings.  I have developed a sense of what I think are the most important skills to stay relevant, and remain employed, in electronics R&D positions. These skills fall into two broad categories: soft skills and hard skills.  I've listed a few of each below.  You may see one that you have been thinking about working on, or you may have others that should be added to the list.

 

Some of the choices are fairly broad, so please feel welcome to specify a particular skill via a comment.

Please select the skill you are most interested in improving, or add a missing skill via a comment.

  • I voted for coding because I feel some need to get properly competent with something to write test programmes for PCs. Most of the stuff I've done since about 1998 was written in VB and I still revert to VB6 when I want something with some basic GUI and some instrument control in a hurry. (Typically talking to the real device outside the PC via Ethernet or serial.)

    I've tried Python and I don't like it at all  - and no (easy) graphics.

     

    I use MATLAB (with several toolboxes) for data analysis but I don't like to use it for testers or demo code because the license is expensive (no good for a bit of demo code to give to a customer.)

     

    I think I'm left with C# or possibly VB.net but neither is a patch on VB6 for occasional user productivity.

     

    Suggestions welcome - cross platform would be nice.

     

    I write 'code' for products in C or VHDL.

     

    MK

  • in reply to DAB

    Another useful skill is successful proposal writing. This is a difficult skill because usually the only proposal that is good enough is the absolute best proposal, and it can mean, and often does mean, the difference between getting paid and being out of work. It is only successful if it is better than all the rest, and there could be a lot of other smart people trying really hard to win.

    All the little contests on element14 are excellent practice for your proposal writing skills, - there is some incentive and reward, but your entire livelihood is not at stake.

  • The best skill I ever developed was drawing skills followed by the ability to do effective presentations.

     

    Your technical skills mean nothing if you cannot project your ideas to the non-technical people who control the money.

     

    They are only going to support you if you show them how the project makes them look good.

     

    The sooner you develop this skill, the more successful you will be.

     

    DAB

  • in reply to dougw

    Very good observation Douglas.  Although I think engineers tend to specialize within a sub-discipline and may need to broaden into other areas over time, it is also true that most engineers will not have deep backgrounds in other sciences.  I should have thought of this as I have been doing more work of late in areas outside my specific scope of expertise, mostly in soil chemistry.

  • I think the "a requirement to continuously upgrade skills and capabilities" is one of the key issues here as I often wonder how much time is lost in continually 'reinventing the wheel' and how one can minimalise it's impact on productivity. For example each new technology tends to come along with its own unique development environment these days and which constantly is being updated so a percentage of your time is lost upgrading or learning a new environment, often with little real benefit at the end of it just because support has been dropped on the previous version or a new host OS has come out. Same with firmware updates, how often have people contacted technical support and found that the first response is that you have to upgrade to the latest firmware version revision to see if that resolves the issue or not irrespective if whether or not firmware is likely to be related. 1,000 firmware updates applied across site later - nope, still no change. Call technical support, "oh we have just released another firmware update, try that first, but you'll first need to upgrade to the latest maintenance utility... register at this site for the download." *argh!*

  • Members on this forum are likely fairly well versed at this skill set. Where they are weakst is likely some other discipline like chemistry or thermodynamics or biology.

    It might be interesting to see how members would rank the above skills in importance for a job designing high tech systems.