Imaginary STEM labor shortage
The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training employees and keeping them. Zig Ziglar Back when the economy wasn’t in the dumpster, I was talking to a friend who works at one of those Internet (with a capital I) companies. He was complaining about their inability to find people with the right qualifications. After spending time talking with him, I ascertained that what his company really wanted was for someone in the same position at a different company to be laid off so that they could hire them. His company had a very exacting list of qualifications and wasn’t willing to train any potential employees. They wanted someone off the shelf, so to speak, and weren’t going to take anyone without those qualifications. On the other hand, they would wait months rather than train the employees themselves. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time. FrauTech has…
Generalist or Specialist
There’s a phrase: jack of all trades master of none. I was thinking of one’s progression as an engineer. When you graduate college you are in many ways like a Swiss army knife (drawing from rowland jones). You have a wide variety of basic tools but are probably not particularly good at any one thing. In many ways college teaches one the ability to learn engineering. And then you spend the rest of your career learning engineering. But at some point you have to start narrowing it down. Especially if you are, like me, a mechanical engineer or as one of my classmates put it a mercenary engineer. My degree qualified me to work in any number of disciplines: mechanical systems, fluids and heat transfer, structural analysis, flight and aerospace technologies, and manufacturing. The first job you take can often lead you down the path of a particular discipline within your…
Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn!
This past weekend, Chris Gammell posted about changing demographics in engineering and was kind enough to have a survey on it. I’ve had a chance to preview some of the results and some of the comments from readers that responded. One of the themes that I saw in the results was definitely a case of older engineers essentially saying “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”. And while I am somewhat sympathetic to that sentiment because it sucks being passed up for someone else, let alone someone (potentially) half your age, it’s pretty lame for older engineers to complain about younger engineers. There are some pretty acute reasons why it sucks to be a young, new engineer. I’ve commented on this in the past, but I’m going to expand it here. On the job training – Back in the day, when companies wanted good engineers, they took competent, dependable people, and trained…