|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
Building
Your Skill Set |
 |
|
|
| |
In the crunch to complete credits and make good grades,
many engineering students forget one of the most important
aspects of their engineering education: their technical
skills. These consist of your ability to use the specific
tools of the discipline you want to work in. Examples
include, for instance:
 |
Competence
at performing engineering design in SolidWorks or
ProEngineer |
|
Ability
to do finite element analysis in ANSYS or ABAQUS |
|
Knowledge of how to program computer numerical controlled
(CNC) machinery |
|
Experience
in taking apart and reassembling automotive engines
and transmissions |
|
Expertise
in using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) |
These are all specific skills that could be important
for a student's chosen career path.
"The [engineering] environment is more competitive [than
it used to be]," says the ASME Career Life Guide. "Engineers
must develop skills to make themselves productive at the
highest level of efficiency. Almost all of the big labs
(like Westinghouse and Bell Labs) have either disappeared
or shrunk. Companies are no longer looking out for career
development of engineers as much as they used to." This
means that if you want to obtain skills in a specific
area, you need to be proactive in providing yourself with
the desired training.
The primary mandate of a college accredited by the Accreditation
Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is to provide
adequate opportunities for its students to equip themselves
with the fundamental knowledge required for competency
and understanding of their major field. A quarter-century
back, employers would hire recent graduates with the understanding
that the company would pick up where college left off,
by providing the special skills required for the job that
were not part of the standard engineering curriculum.
Those days are long gone.
In today's job market, the successful candidates for entry-level
positions will possess the industry-specific skills and
experience that enable them to "hit the ground running"
and quickly become productive employees. Today's employers
have drastically shrunk the timeframe tolerated for the
return-on-investment of a new hire. Few companies choose
to invest significant resources in training a new hire,
especially when the chances are that they will move on
to another company in a few years. Today, someone who
has been with a company for five years is an "old timer."
More and more, the meaning of "experience" has changed
from "exposure to the culture of an industrial workplace"
to "having applied knowledge and skills gained in a specific
technical area."
At this point, you might be yelling at your flat-panel
monitor: "What?! 'Entry-level' jobs shouldn't require
experience! If the job requires experience, then it should
not be called 'entry level!'" That's an understandable
reaction. Go ahead: shoot the messenger. But you'll see
what we mean as graduation nears and you start interviewing
for jobs.
We suggest that you research what skills most employers
will expect from you in your specific discipline. One
place to start is the ASME Career Life Guide, which suggests
that students studying mechanical engineering should obtain
the following computer skills prior to graduation:
|
A
working knowledge of a word processing software,
spreadsheet software and mathematical software such
as MathCad, MATLAB or Mathematica |
|
An understanding of how to use computer-aided design
(CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools.
It may not matter which ones, but know what they
can do for you |
|
Training
in at least one 2-D drafting package (although 3-D
or solid modeling is just about a standard requirement
now) |
|
Training
in finite element analysis (FEA) |
Beyond that, engineers are well served by programming
skills such as Visual Basic and C++ programming languages,
but it is not as important in many jobs.
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
