What should be expected of a new engineer? 6

[spongebob007]

This summer we hired a guy right out of college. The ink on his diploma is barely dry. I was assigned to be his mentor, and frankly the guy is driving me nuts. Sometimes I wonder how he managed to make it through engineering school. He does not have any projects of his own. I am the "project engineer" and I assign him subtasks from my projects. I have kept it as simple as possible, giving him mostly engineering change orders to process. I also have given him some very simple CAD modeling tasks to do since he has no real experience with any 3D modeling packages. The thing that frustrates me is that I have to show him how to do these things a half dozen times, and he still doesn't get it. I have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but we are going on three months here and he still doesn't seem to be with the program. A task I could do in ten minutes takes him two days. It's frustrating because we are facing real deadlines and he's just dicking around, and after having things explained to him multiple times, he still seems to have no clue what he is doing. I can show him exactly how to do something, and literally ten minutes later he will ask me how to do it again.

This is my first real mentoring experience and I don't quite know how to handle it. I haven't said anything to my supervisor yet because I really am trying to give this kid the benefit of the doubt, but after three months, I think he should be able to at least process an engineering change notice. It seems like nothing sinks in and he is as clueless as the day he walked in. So are my expectations unrealistic or is this kid maybe not cut out for the job? How should I handle the situation? I was thinking about taking him aside and having a face to face before going to the boss. Good idea or no? What should I do?

 

[s0eebuch]

Yeah, I agree with TurbineGen.

I feel like I'm the New Engineer right now (see my thread at the top of this group listing).

Have you talked to the noobie? Asked him/her what the deal is - does that person think they should have gotten up to speed yet?

This may be an indication of weither the problem lies completely with noobie, with your mentoring, or a combination of both. (If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on a combination.)