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Kids today graduate from engineering school aged in their mid-20s. Yet they are largely unfit for purpose despite the effort and funds they have expended to become ‘job ready’.
This is merely my jaundiced opinion. But it is based on internships offered and delivered to half-a-dozen top graduates with Honours and Masters Degrees coming out of Electronic Engineering at Adelaide University over these past three years.
There’s no value in scoffing at their ignorance; they simply have had too little hours at the bench figuring out how electronic things REALLY work. Yet these bright and energetic young people are worthy of our best efforts to get them off to better than a wobbly start in an engineering career.
We need them to take over as we older engineers retire.
So I get them in to MEA as interns, find them a project, and spend way too much of company time getting them to grasp the harsh reality of basic concepts, such as Ohm’s Law the way it plays out in practice.
EIDA members head off on a tour of the Electronic Engineering School at Adelaide University on the 16th Feb 2016.
I, for one, will be looking to find out why all that education still leaves them fit only for jobs in cafes and warehouses. -
Andrew,
In the 2000 ~2005 period EIA arranged ‘Cadetships’ for EEE students who had completed third year.
They completed fourth year part-time over 2 years and worked in a local electronics firm and were paid half-time during term time and full-tome during the 26 vacation weeks (less holidays). They therefore worked 70%- 75% of full-time and learned HOW to apply the theory they had learned and how to find the solutions to problems in the real world of electronic engineering.
Would such a scheme prvide some answers to the problem as you see it?
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I, for one, will be looking to find out why all that education still leaves them fit only for jobs in cafes and warehouses.
Any intern that can make me a good coffee is likely to get twice as much of my time and have me in a better mood. So it may be an essential career developing skill.
We have been taking on interns a lot lately. Initially we did not – we wanted to help but had no idea what we would do with an intern once it had arrived. The big thing I have learned is that it is better to take on interns in areas where you company is not so strong. We have had no end of joy from accounting interns for example. Now I’ve run a business for 24 years so my accounting skill can’t be too lean. But they are nothing compared to my teams engineering skills. The interns add real value in addressing projects that we are not especially skilled for (or interested in).
But I am not sure of the prospects for an Electronic Engineer at an accounting firm – but maybe in importer that sees themselves more as sales/accounting in nature could be mutually beneficial.
I share the frustration – and I don’t know the answer. But universities are not (in my humble opinion) vocational education institutions. Truth be known – I think they should be research institutions – that teach some bright people on the side. Maybe the bench ready student should be coming from TAFE – maybe there are not enough benches left.
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Thanks chaps
Ron – I’m sure that the cadetships would have been invaluable to those young graduate engineers in giving them some confidence and usefulness from their first day in a real job.
The difficulty I have is the high cost to a small company of funding the cadetship, even at a half-time salary. Yes, the cash is hard to come by, but the teaching time needed is the biggest drain.
It’s still worth doing though.
One of the greatest moments during an internship comes when you realize that the intern has just told you something, or done something, that you yourself hadn’t thought of, didn’t know or could not have found time to do. That ‘tipping point’ may be reached after as little as one month with a very bright student. After that they are worth having around, and are a positive influence for all.
Don – I haven’t many clues about accounting so have never interned anyone from that field. I wonder whether – dealing as they do with figures and computing systems – they are more ‘job ready’ than engineers?
Maybe you have also touched on the real problem here with graduate engineers. Their lack of vocational skills – the sort of nouse that you would expect of a technician from the TAFE – is something that engineering graduates simply have had too little time to develop? I think of this as ‘bench skills’. One Masters Student (Chinese) didn’t know what an oscilloscope was.
As the great Jim Williams (Linear Technology’s electronics guru) said: “Always solder and debug your own circuits – don’t just flick them over to some hapless technician to sort out after you designed it” (paraphrased with a wide license) -
CADETSHIP
One of the best liked features of the EIA Cadetship program was the ~ two-year term.
This was much preferred to the 13 week 3rd/4th year vacation period.
If 13 weeks is too short to complete a significant project, then 2 years is enough to engage in a number of different projects. e.g an EIA cadet at Clipsal Electronics in stage 1 analysed and reported on the concept of an automated test system for a high volume product. Stage 2 he designed the system. Stage 3 he built the and tested the system. Stage 4 he installed and implemented the system into their production process. Stage 5 he analysed the daily operation of the system and made small improvements and wrote a report on the whole project. Total elapsed time about 1.5 years. This was always a one year + project and the 2 year cadetship gave him great experience on this project.
Estimated wage rates today for this work ~ $25 -$30 per hour (incl. 25% loading for casual, no holidays etc.) Is this level of pay reasonable?
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Bench-testing new engineers
I enjoyed the EIDA tour of the electronic engineering laboratories at Adelaide University on the 16th February 2016 and listened with interest to the staff presentations about their research.
What I had hoped to see, I did not – a hive of activity in the undergraduate labs of students hacking electronic projects together. I finally figured out that they probably hadn’t even come back from Christmas leave yet, let alone been assigned projects and partners for the 2016 student year.
So this left me only one source of answers to my question of how much ‘bench experience’ engineering students actually get in real electronics; I asked a recent graduate how long he’d spent in the lab each week.
Luckily, I had one of those down the back lab…
Justin He (pictured) is a newly-minted Chinese engineer who completed his Masters Degree in Electronic Engineering at Adelaide Uni last year, and has since been looking for work.
He’s filling the long hours by doing an internship with me in my home lab, beavering away there while I’m off at work shuffling papers and attending meetings. We spend Wednesdays together doing the more intensive explanations and troubleshooting.
He’s prototyped a ‘stuck node tester’ and a sensitive millivoltmeter, and has graduated to the higher echelons of ‘fixing’
The HP3400 RMS voltmeter he’s attempting to repair is probably 40 years old but still has specifications that beat the modern handheld Fluke 179 True RMS meter on the bench nearby. Crest factor is 10 (compared with the Fluke’s 3) and the bandwidth runs to 10 MHz (compared to the Fluke’s 1 kHz).
You can pick a HP3400A up for about $75 second-hand, and inside there you will find a whole education in circuit design in a readily repairable and thoroughly documented form.
So how many lab hours did Adelaide Uni give Justin?
12 hours per subject in two subjects over two years.
He runs up that many hours every couple of days during bench-testing.
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