How do you all quickly train new engineers cheaply? 8

[zephramcochrane]

This is a problem me and my company have been struggling with for sometime now. The people who interview with us, especially straight out of school, lack the experience in taking a full aircraft design through from requirements to delivery (like a small 1 pound UAV) . I know for most schools, that is a hard problem to solve, and as such we have looked for a good solution. However, after an extensive search the best we found was a disjoint set of notes from MIT explaining some theory behind aircraft design, and the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Homebuilder's Tip website. While both are fairly good at giving the user either an overview of how to design aircraft, or in the case of the EAA Homebuilder's Tip website, actionable tips, neither seamlessly integrates it to take a newbie engineer through to mastery. My company is small, and needs the engineers we hire to start work immediately, and when they can't cut it, we have to cut them loose. It is a bad problem, and now starting to affect how quickly we can work since the people with us are overworked as is.

Hence I am posting here. What do your companies do for training newbie engineers? Do you all have the problem of having to fast, on the job training for new graduates?

*By training I mean where engineers can go from requirements to a detailed design to a physical part that flies, within budget and schedule. By mastery, I mean where they can quickly gauge from the requirements stage how much money and time the project will take given current technology.

 

[rb1957]

6. all of the above !

very few people would get to do all the jobs you're talking about ... CFD, detail design, stress analysis, aero loads, ...

yes, knowing you're in the kit build market changes the certification requirements substantially.

designing/building UAVs isn't good experience IMO for designing/building planes (even kit planes).

testing is generally the default in certification substantiation. Analysis is mainly risk mitigation (to be reasonably sure the tests will pass). For a kit build having to reinforce the structure at the last minute may be acceptable ... it is easy (simple s/m parts) and hard (s/m gauges define the changes you can make).

pay a lot of attention to anything machined, make it over-sized ... these things tend to be quite small in the overall scheme of things so don't add much weight, but having to rework them can be very difficult (and expensive).

texts like Raymer and Torenbeek will get you a long way in the overall design.

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[tbuelna]

zephramcochrane-

I hope you don't take the criticism too hard. I recently started a contract job doing mechanical systems design on a large UAV. A silicon valley company is behind the project and they have massive financial resources. They still went through a steep learning curve, but to their credit they quickly figured out that to get a satisfactory result within their time frame they needed to hire experienced people at every level. And this is something they seem to be aggressively pursuing.

Here's my personal experience with training. At the first engineering job I had (many years ago) with a large aerospace company, the only work I was assigned for almost 18 months was preparing hand written ECN's. They made it clear that until I could demonstrate the ability to perform a simple task like preparing an ECN properly, I would not be assigned more complicated work. In reality, preparing ECN's on a production aerospace program can get a bit complicated and it was a great way to teach you to pay attention to details and thoroughly check your work for errors. The ECN's were reviewed by over a dozen engineering specialists/managers, and they always seemed eager to reject an ECN for even the smallest error. Reprocessing a rejected ECN cost the company money and the program director would raise heck with your dept manager for ECNs rejected due to stupid/obvious mistakes. Your dept manager would then call you into his office for a stern reminder about the importance of thoroughly checking your work for errors.