Training Young Engineers 19

[kylesito]

The last post (as of this date) in this thread,

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=366529,

makes the joke that new engineers are a liability for the first two years and should actually be paying the organization for putting up with them. While obviously an exaggeration, sadly my own experience with young engineers over the last two or three years wouldn't put me far off of believing this!

Instead of railing on about the quality of education, work ethic, etc of newly minted engineering grads, I'd like to propose a different question. What are some steps someone like me, a mid-senior level engineer, can do to better train young engineers and get them to the point where they are capable of flying on their own?

The challenge is two-fold:

1) They don't have the technical skills necessary to become productive and need 'taught' everything it seems.
2) In a small company, there are not the resources available to dedicate to a formalized mentoring/training program.



PE, SE
Eastern United States

"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death!"
~Code of Hammurabi

 

[ajack1]

I think it really depends on the attitude of the grad.
With most things in life you pick them up a bit at a time and generally the people that put in the most effort and work the hardest get to the top, some will have more natural talent or find it easier but hard work, determination and shear bloody-mindedness can take you a long way.
I am not sure people are any different today to they have ever been, but society has changed people’s expectations and belief in how good they are.
We have gone from yes sir how high would you like me to jump to nobody tells me how to jump and I can jump better than you anyway.

 

[moltenmetal]

Pick good ones. The best way to do this is to hire and PAY them as co-op students. Consider it a 4 or 8 month interview, except one that actually works for determining the "fit" of the person to the work environment.

Hire the best of those. There's the trick- being small, you can't hire the very best one every year- so your choices need to be made even more carefully.

Give them responsibility for something they're competent to do- even a fresh grad is competent to do LOTS- we get tons of productive and creative and carefully executed work out of our students, much less our junior hires. Answer questions. Provide resources and advice, the latter sometimes unbidden. Monitor their performance. Check their work. Provide constructive feedback. Increase/broaden their responsibility. Repeat.

We also make them do technical refresher/specialist training seminars for the whole group, with one of the more senior people acting as mentor. Motivates some learning in depth.

We see no attitude problems indicative of a generational difference in our junior staff. Nobody brings their mommy in to negotiate salary with us etc. All we see is a diversity of personality types, work styles and levels of skill/access to their education. No different than young engineers have ever been.

 

[IRstuff]

Unfortunately, the reality of most business is that no one in management wants to spend the money necessary to make much progress on something like this.

There multiple factors at work:
> no one wants to spend contract dollars doing OJT of a new hire, because they know the new hire will have low productivity and needs lots of help
> no one wants to spend MORE contract dollars on a senior engineer with lowered productivity, because they're helping the new hire
> no one has so much fat that they could do this on overhead, although, that would be much cheaper
> in lean times, there are so few projects and they are leanly funded, so mostly junior engineers are used to keep the margins positive, and there's no margin to absorb the training of the new employee



The end result is that the new hire has low productivity much longer than what might even be a reasonable period of time.

TTFN
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[moltenmetal]

People that try to run professional businesses with staffing on a "just in time" basis are going to suffer some unpleasant consequences. Many businesses have convinced themselves that they can't afford to hire young people and train them. I'm hoping that the coming demographic shift wipes them off the face of the earth.

There's the old joke where the accountant says, "What if we spend money training people and they leave?" To which some wise person replies, "What if we don't spend money training them and they STAY?"

 

[steellion]

If your graduates are coming out of school lacking the technical background necessary to meet your goals, then either you're hiring the wrong students or you're hiring from the wrong school. Typically entry-level engineers have the math skills, know the basic design equations, it just takes time to learn how to apply them appropriately in the real world.

Be upfront and honest with your expectations of them. Challenge young engineers to try to solve the problem, and propose a potential solution for your review rather than just simply asking "how do I do this?" This will help them grow and take the stress of constant questions off of you.

 

[zdas04]

Moltenmetal,
I have never thought of internship/co-op as a multi-month job interview, but that is exactly what it is. After reading your two posts, I think you have given the OP exactly the solution to his issue.

I look at the "Challenger" style of new hire process (i.e., for the first 3 years a new hire has to take a pre-defined list of courses, fill 3 jobs under the supervision of a local mentor, and suck up to some head office "coordinator") and see abject failure time after time. Some of the mentors are great and their "grads" leave with the potential to contribute, but most of the mentors either ignore the grads or refuse to let them fail by smothering them. Unfortunately the over-protective and neglectful models are most common (not everyone has the ability to be a mentor). Most of the pre-defined courses are worthless for the person's eventual first non-Challenger job. The structure of those programs tend to cause more failures than successes. With the looser structure of most summer-dummy programs it is much easier to evaluate their performance vs. your needs instead of against some irrelevant "norm".

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[moltenmetal]

David, we're very glad we figured this out as an organization- it's been one of the keys to our continued growth and success. It's kind of stupid that we didn't know it from the get-go, because three quarters of the founders were engineers who had been through co-op education- yet for the first long while when I worked there, we had no co-ops and almost no fresh grad hires. The trigger was that we discovered the hard way that we were crap at hiring senior people- even with professional help. We've discovered that in our niche business, to be truly effective, engineers need to be fabricated from properly selected raw materials rather than merely being selected from a candidate pool. Too many of the seniors we hired were either broken beyond our ability to repair, or too work-hardened to allow themselves to be molded into what the business needed them to be. Not their fault- entirely ours for picking the wrong people. At the same time that the seniors were failing, the co-ops I brought in were succeeding, and fortunately we learned from that. It hasn't been 100% perfect- there are always some problem children, some turnover due to issues beyond our control- people are people- and sometimes you let the market tell you to hire too many people at once or to let good ones go by because you have no immediate use for them, but that's business I guess.

Yes, we had to take some senior engineers, myself included, out of their comfort zone, lose some of their productivity in the short term, and force them to mentor and train as part of their duties- but now their productivity is amplified greatly by the team of smart and comparatively inexpensive young people who they have to draw their teams from. Some of the seniors are better at it than others, some mollycoddle, some ignore or delegate the training to someone mid-level, and some micromanage, and each has their own style of work. We try our best to get each junior to go through a project under the mentorship of each of us, gradually allowing them to develop a hybrid style of work which suits them best. There's of course a desire on the part of some to standardize all our work practices around THEIR workstyle, but the others resist it. But the ones uncomfortable working without a well-defined single set of rules to follow are weeded out as co-ops because they don't fit the existing work culture here, so it causes us comparatively few problems.

 

[kylesito]

Molten/Dave - This is some good info. I wanted to get out of the philosophical 'feel good' answers and get to real experiences. I think everyone knows how it should work and can give the quick ideological answers to these type of questions, but it's understanding the execution of this that really makes the difference.

Molten, in your experience what do you think of the sink or swim mentality? I have tried emulating my own experience in my first job in construction where the superintendent would throw a project at us and let us flounder a little to figure it out. I understand now that it was never out of his control but we definitely felt the pressure of getting it right because we felt as though it was all on us. He probably knew the answer before we came back with it but I think this was very beneficial to me as a younger engineer to feel this pressure. Do you share similar experiences with your young hires?

Dave, in regards to your post and in context with what I said above, do you think tilting slightly towards the hands off approach would be more successful than towards the over protective side?

PE, SE
Eastern United States

"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death!"
~Code of Hammurabi

 

[moltenmetal]

Man, if you got the five of us together in one room, poured us all a few beers and then asked that question, you'd get a really interesting discussion- probably pretty loud too.

Sink or swim versus micromanaging? I have no patience for micromanaging. We agree that the pressure is necessary- we do try to get them to stand on their own on a small job as soon as possible. My natural tendency is toward sink or swim, but I do have very strong opinions and don't let projects I'm working on go too far wrong in the initial assumptions so some of them find me meddlesome. But I can't check everything and don't even try. If I were hired as a checker, I'd be fired immediately- I can find the one or two major screw-ups at least as well as anybody in the office, but lack the discipline to focus on the number-by-number checking that some people manage to do.

It's a case by case, person-by-person, task by task decision. Some people have a work style which allows me to trust their judgment a bit even when their competence is very limited- I prefer to judge results than to review intermediate product. Others want constant confirmation that they're on the right track- and within reason I try to give it to them, until they start driving me nuts. Some of them don't have judgment I can trust- yet- and I'm not gentle about bringing them back to what I consider to be the right path when they stray too far from it. Major screw-ups made by carelessness or laziness get taken up a notch and noted during their review, along with things they did better than expectations. The good ones don't make those errors or find them by their own checking (or use other juniors to help them check), and if they ever do, they discipline themselves more severely than we ever could.

Still learning how to do this, and probably not actually getting better at it- but the staff themselves are getting better so that's taking some of the pressure off.

 

[zdas04]

The best mentor I've known (it decidedly was not me) had a modified sink-or-swim technique that worked better than any other I've ever seen. He gave you an assignment, if you had questions he took the time to answer. Once a week he scheduled some time (at really sucky times of day, 5 am, 7 pm, whatever worked for his schedule that week) to have you tell him about your progress. He was not kind or in any way gentle (I'm still missing some parts of my anatomy 30 years later), but at the end of the session you knew what your next steps needed to be and you knew the strengths/weaknesses of your efforts for that week). In other words he would throw you into water just over your head and not leave you on your own quite long enough to drown, no matter what it felt like. I knew another so-called mentor that would give a guy a project and then wait for the final report--when it was crap he'd say something like "that is why I gave you an unimportant assignment because you lack the ability to do anything worthwhile".

The very best outcomes result from having the interns do something that you in-fact want done and giving them the latitude to do it while staying on the lookout for major course correction requirements.

It is never 100%, how can it be with people? I believe that this technique of a multi-month job interview gives you a great chance of beating the odds. If you hire someone into a "Challenger" program then getting rid of them is really painful and we tend to not get rid of the ones that should be out the door. In a co-op configuration if you get a slug then you don't ask them back and you are only out their nominal salary for the summer and the mentor's time.

I get accused of using too many anecdotes (and my signature used to assert that the "plural of anecdote is not data"), but I find they are useful in illuminating the conversation. When my son was starting engineering school I told him that on day 1 he needed to start work on lining up a co-op. He went to his adviser (an academic who had never worked as an engineer) and asked how to make that happen. His adviser said that the school of engineering did not endorse co-op programs and that everything he needed to be a practicing engineer was included in his coursework. I later learned that fewer than 30% of the engineering graduates in that school did not have a job lined up on graduation day. The year I graduated (admittedly a long time ago and from a different university), 100% of the co-op students in my school had jobs at graduation day; as opposed to 70% of the non co-op students (about 15% of the graduating class in engineering that year didn't have jobs). People stopped going to my son's school to hire engineers because they graduated totally innocent of how to be an engineer.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[Ron]

I'm on the side of sink or swim. Obviously it depends on the individual to step up, but when they do, you get a better engineer. When they don't, someone else has an "opportunity".

Agree with MM an zdas04...great comments and discussion.

 

[SomptingGuy]

I like the idea that a co-op be given real work that was going to be done anyway. That's what I was given in the places I worked as a student.

I had the benefit of one of those degree courses that reqired you to find an industrial sponsor (and only from a list they gave you). You needed to get that sponsor yourself and work for them in an engineering position for a year before university. Precisely the opposite of one of the previous comments here. Summer placements too and a notional year after graduation. At the end it was expected that you would have an option to work for them. They also expected to retain some of the students - enough to make it all worthwhile.

As part of this course we got to meet up for regular seminars, where we could compare notes about our sponsors and the kind of work they'd got us to do. Mostly it was real work.

I did ask my HR manager why the company threw all this money at a bunch of school leavers with no guarantee of a return. He said that it was the most cost-effective way they knew of for producing young engineers.

- Steve

 

[zdas04]

Steve,
If you don't mind saying, what school was that? A program that amazing should be advertised. I'm sure that with that kind of experience you went into the theoretical classes with real-world questions that gave you a far better understanding of the theory.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[JedClampett]

Back to the OP.
What I like to do with new or newish engineers is to give them a completed project, done by an experienced engineer, to review. That way they see how a project is put together, learn to read drawings, hopefully develop a questioning attitude. It's not the most efficient or thorough review, but every once in a while they catch something. Plus they get to contribute right away.
The next step is to give them a project that's already roughly laid out and have them do the calculations. And no computer software. All hand calculations. I need to have engineers, not button pushers. They'll get their computer work soon enough. Once again, not super efficient, but a way to learn.
Then the other tasks. Submittal reviews, editing specifications, answering field questions, etc. After a while, they're ready to do their own projects, design their own buildings.
One thing that's good about our licensing laws, is that there's no way for any new engineer to seal their own work. Somewhere, a licensed engineer has to take "reasonable charge."
Co-ops are great, I guess, but there's no way that a majority of engineers are going to go that route. And at bigger companies, it needs to be a corporate decision, so our little opinions might not mean a thing. We need to be able to bring in fresh engineers and make them useful and productive from as early as possible.
Finally, let's not forget the role in the engineer themself. They need to show initiative and interest enough to ask questions and learn by doing. Not everyone is going to work out. And no amount of training in the world can change that.

 

[SomptingGuy]

David,

School: Imperial College, London.
Course: BEng Mechanical Engineering Total Technology

The course itself was started in '74 and was still going strong when I finished in '90.

I can't see the course listed on the university

http://WWW site

any more unfortunately. I remember Brunel University offering something very similar at the time (also UK), but with 4 half-ans-half years to get a BEng - it looks like it still exists in some form. A few of my co-op colleagues back then were Brunel boys & girls. Brunel used to find sponsor companies if you couldn't find one yourself. Several other British universities were offering (promoting) the 1-3-1 approach back then too.


- Steve

 

[SomptingGuy]

more...

I had a look through the Brunel site and found:

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/services/pcc/about-us/services-for-students/placement

So it seems that Brunel still run these type of courses and do still provide assistance, where needed, to find suitable placements.


- Steve

 

[KENAT]

I swear I'd answered a similar question in detail before but can't find it now. Here's a starter for 10;-)

thread732-176850
thread731-359330

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[moltenmetal]

We don't like these "marriage" mentorship situations. We like 4 month co-op placements best. We can put up with, and get work out of, just about anybody for four months. Same for them- if they're a bad fit, the longest they have to suffer with us is 4 months. The good ones we get back for a subsequent 4 months, after one or two more terms of school. 2 terms at most, even for the best ones- we want them to get other experience so they come to know that the grass probably isn't greener...

We had an experience year guy once, brought in for a particular project. His assigned project died after 6 months and we were stuck with him for the other 6- he was a dud, but you'd have to be pretty heartless to turf a student mid-term in an experience year. That tendency to keep "challenger" or "experience year" candidates just because you know them is pretty strong and in our opinion it leads to poor results. We'd MUCH rather put up with the extra recruiting and training hassle of revolving 4 month terms than reduce the number of candidates we "interview" via internship, because of that group only a few are superstars and we find that it's very tough to figure out who the superstars are going to be beforehand. I can say that with authority because the recruitment and training/mentorship hassle is my own rather than some HR department doing most of it for me- I'm the one going through the reams of application packages, selecting and interviewing candidates, and working with at least a few of them on projects as well as seeing the reviews for all of them.

We sign up with the only school in the area which has students available on 4 month terms year round, and we don't take summer students unless we have a sudden unanticipated need which happens to occur in summer. It ties us to one school, the fact of which we don't like much- but if you compare the resumes of the kids from that school to kids from the other non-co-op schools, there's no comparison.

 

[zdas04]

Tied to one school can be a mixed bag. On the one hand they've all had the same instructors and every instructor has blind spots. On the other hand if you notice a systematic lack you have a relationship that can work to fixing it. I'm thinking that the positives outweigh the negatives if you work to nurture your relationship with the staff.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat