I was startled to read this article in the Wall Street Journal.
Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.
“How do I do that?” asked the young man.
So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101. “You learn by doing,” he said. “These kids in school during the pandemic, all they’ve done is work on computers.”
The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country. It is one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.
There's more at the link.
Frankly, I'm baffled. If possession of a degree, or a certificate, or a qualification, is supposed to imply a certain basic level of knowledge and/or skill, why is it being awarded at all in the absence of that knowledge or skill? When I was studying, that certainly wasn't the case. You had to demonstrate that you'd mastered the required level of knowledge, and if you couldn't do that adequately, you didn't graduate. It was as simple as that. Today, it seems that's no longer the case. Why??? Why are institutions of learning allowed to get away with what is, essentially, fraud, by sending their "graduates" out into the workplace without the level of knowledge or skill that employers assume they have?
As for "learning by doing", I entirely agree with Mr. Devengenzo. When I was a supervisor and manager in the computer industry, I made a point of always (when possible) hiring those with practical experience as well as (or even instead of) academic qualifications. I invariably found that a programmer who'd learned to code "on the job" and had built up three or four years' good-quality experience would be far more productive and stable than a newly graduated BS in computer science. I hired accordingly. As for MBA's . . . I hold such a qualification myself, but I didn't expect it to make me a "guru" or know-it-all consultant. I looked to it to round out my business knowledge in areas to which I hadn't been exposed. I completed it part-time, as I did all my university qualifications, and kept on working while studying. That kept me grounded, and stopped me going off into academic flights of fantasy. Again, I found that those who took time off work to study for such degrees took several years to get their feet back on the ground afterwards. I tried not to hire (or work for) them. (Then there are those who take an MBA or equivalent without ever having worked "at the coalface" in business and commerce. How is that even possible? They've never "done", so how can they learn? It's not like medicine or high-tech stuff, where one can learn the theory and then put it into practice. Management is different.)
Maybe I'm just an old fart, but in the military and in business, if one held a certain position or rank, competence was assumed. Whenever that competence was absent, the person(s) concerned usually screwed up by the numbers, leading to endless problems. Life became a "blame game", pointing fingers and trying to avoid being held responsible for the fall-out. Sound familiar? I'm sure many of my readers have experienced something similar.
I'm certain you know the old saying:
- Those who can, do.
- Those who can't, teach.
- Those who can't teach, lecture on the psychology of education.
Peter
I always thought thismovie clip expressed it quite well. The value of practical experience vs Ivy Tower theory. And that applies to the people coming out from there, as you posted.
ReplyDeleteA friend, for whom I've done some design work, owns a confidential prototyping business; Company X comes to him to produce "6 of these" for evaluation and testing, and "these" is almost always a quite complex object.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't advertise or solicit and the company name is not on the building, but is well known in the Right Circles and, as such, gets a small number of resumes each spring when engineering schools graduate. He has a firm policy applied to resumes: he reads only the graduation date and if it's less than 15 years prior the resume immediately goes in the trash. His explanation? "I need actual, hot, sweaty, hands-on, work experience doing the kind of stuff we do.This is a quality intensive and time sensitive business, not a Training Academy."
He has also expressed concern about younger applicants being addicted to the Social Justice Warrior mentality which universities seem to breed into recent graduates. His concern is that one of them will "have their delicate sensibilities upset" because they have a "problem" with Company X, Y or Z and either antagonize a client or go public with what that company is researching. Unless he knows them personally, all new hires start as contract employees in the "public shop" in a remote separate building to prove themselves with regular commercial work; some have their contracts expire and never even learn about the larger confidential portion of the business.
They're doing it in healthcare too. Doctor shortage has lead to increases demand for nurse practitioners. And many of these programs are entirely online. Patient 'assessments' are done by computer simulation. Think about this the next time you visit your GP's office.
ReplyDeleteThis is hardly a new or "pandemic" problem, although I don't doubt its become much worse - I began my career with an aerospace company that required all newly hired "puppy" (freshly degreed) engineers to spend a minimum number of hours working in the machine shop before allowed to work on anything critical. And this was nearly 40 years ago. Some came in with those skills already, too many still needed to aquire them.
ReplyDeletePeter,
ReplyDelete"why is it being awarded at all in the absence of that knowledge or skill? "
You KNOW why. And I know why. And most everyone that reads any blog similar to this one knows why.
There's just nothing we seem to be able to do about it.
Crap, this is a depressing way to start a Friday.
Those who can't do or teach... teach gym! :)
ReplyDeleteTractorguy
The degree is awarded to make money. That's the (im)moral of the story. The number of dumb university graduates and graduates of law school (my area of advanced education) is truly staggering.
ReplyDeleteThis is NOT a new problem. I graduated from Penn State in 1986 and my advisor had a grad student with a BSME who had never seen a machine tool of any kind and we needed to make an aluminum sample mount for an x-ray machine.
ReplyDelete"It's not like medicine or high-tech stuff, where one can learn the theory and then put it into practice."
ReplyDeleteIn Medicine, most assuredly, patients are the primary source of ejumacaton. Lectures, presentations, meetings, etc. with persons who speak from experience (not the swallow and regurgitate variety) are the next best thing. Books, the dead tree variety, and the pixels 'n bits formats are ancilliary.
That's not what my father said. He learned to practice medicine by reading books. Don't project your learning style on other people. The people in medical school "on their merit" generally have IQ over 140. With that lower bound being family practice or hospitalists. Many have IQ over 180 in the specialties.
DeleteI graduated high school in 2005. I took the last film photography course offered; after us they demolished the darkroom and went all digital. Shop class was already a thing of the past, as were home economics and any other practical skill. All was sacrificed on the holy altar of standardized tests to get you into college.
ReplyDeleteColleges were already heavily into buttsex and racial grievances instead of results. All of my engineering professors were asian immigrants, some of whom even spoke english. Practical skills were something you got on your own, in a club like SAE, if you had time and energy left over from teaching yourself engineering (Lord knows the professors and the textbook were little help).
Then, when we graduated and went to work we found ourselves paid less than the guy with a hotdog cart earns, under the vicious thumb of obese female HR departments, increasingly replaced by imported technicians from lands that haven't figured out indoor plumbing.
My "engineering" program - really a glorified math degree - didn't involve drafting (on a board or computer). Nor did it involve any machine shop time, other than the one tour where we were basically told to never touch the machines. This was in the mid '90s. Based on the experiences of other engineers I've worked with, this wasn't the norm at the time, but I don't know about nowadays.
ReplyDeleteThis is not new. I am an Electrical Engineer that went to college in 75. I went into Telecom since I worked for the phone company to pay for college. I worked in all areas of Telecom. I later became a Manager and in 96 I was transferred to one of my company's subsidiaries. I later moved to become their Transmission Manager. When I took over I spent at least four months making my Engineers correct on documentation presentation so that everything was solid and there was no issues.
ReplyDeleteI had to hire an additional person and I had many college people apply but most wanted too much money and were not qualified at the start. It would take a good year to get one of these persons up to speed on all equipment and document presentation. I ended up hiring a person from another company.
It's 1981, I am a nobody walking the halls in the teaching hospital where I work. Ahead of me is the dean and some other MuckityMuck. I can hear them talking about the student who is failing and the consequences to the Medical School if he is thrown out and defaults on his loan making it harder for future med students to pay their salaries. They talked about areas of medical practice that he would do the least harm. It is common for institutions to value themselves well above those they were created to serve.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it is funny what you can learn if you are considered so insignificant as to not matter.
There's another problem there, though.
ReplyDeleteWe are talking about skills people used to learn either OTJ or in an apprenticeship, which people are now being forced to pay (i.e. go into debt) to learn, before they ever get the job.
I'd say the real problem is businesses offloading the expense of training onto their own future employees.
The flip side to that is that the company spending money to train an employee risks losing that employee as soon as they have some real skills to market. Without some defined and legally enforceable period to amortize training costs during which the employee is bound to the company, its a losing proposition for most businesses.
DeleteMy brother (a mechanical engineering student) had an internship 3 summers ago at Autoliv, an airbag manufacturer. He did very well there, mostly because he also had practical shop experience from my dad (a retired welder and machinist who has a low opinion of the quality of engineers' prototype plans). He said that one of his mentors told him about halfway through the summer that 'everyone knew' that engineers coming out of his school had terrible materials science deficiencies - didn't understand what materials had what properties, etc., and that it had been this way for 10 years.
ReplyDeleteWell, it turns out that the problem is the teacher of all the materials science classes. A nice guy, my brother says, but totally incompetent. So he and his buddies in the engineering department wrote up a petition for more hands-on science classes and also for that teacher to stop teaching those classes. I don't know that it ever went anywhere, but he was pretty worked up about it.
My brother's lucky, though, in that he's been part owner in my dad's backyard welding shop side gig since he was 10 (he helped buy the start-up equipment with paper route money). Thanks to my dad's tutelage, he has the practical skills necessary to be a competent engineer.
It used to be Mechanical Engineers had to take a machining class to get a BS in ME. Now you take a machining course for a BS in Mechanical Engineering Technology - a slightly different degree. Lots of engineers graduate, it seems, without any idea how things are made.
ReplyDeleteMost people do not understand the skills needed to be a machinist so they do not value that education. Without machinists, nothing would be made or done -- every single thing you touch today had a machinist, mold maker or die maker involved, and yet, people take those skills for granted.
Covid didn't help, but the word has to get out about this valuable occupation, especially to parents of high school age children and their counselors. Mike Rowe has been a champion of this concept and we need more work done to get the people in the trades.
Twenty years ago, my father regularly referred to the college kids trying to get a job as "educated idiots". If they had not worked for him before, he would not hire them. it took too long to get them up to speed where they were productive, and where they would stop trying to tell him all the things they thought he was doing wrong. His ways gave him one of the highest safety records in a dangerous business and he never lacked a job.
ReplyDelete“These kids in school during the pandemic, all they’ve done is work on computers.”
ReplyDelete-- this has been true for a couple of decades at least, not just during the wuflu. I furnished my shop and made money reselling surplus machines as schools sold off their shop equipment and replaced it with PC based 'simulations.'
It's been 12 years since I stopped working for a large corporation, after a decade, and we were having issues with the 'kids' from the time I joined. Most of the engineering staff was from eastern europe, and had a very cookie cutter/ recipe book approach to engineering. They could only do stuff that had been done before. Some of them, I wondered how they graduated at all. One guy didn't understand ratios or cross-multiplication. I couldn't convince him that it worked. Unfortunately he wasn't the only engineer at the company who didn't understand ratios.
More complex issues like tolerance stacking were entirely unknown, and bit them on the butt more than once.
Sometimes they would design things that couldn't be built, or that were unnecessarily complex, or that cost more because they didn't use standard setups. One I called them on was specifying a 46 degree angle for a fixture. The fixture held an adjustable mount that had more than enough range to accommodate the extra degree (which was unneeded to make the system work anyway.) The engineer insisted that since it worked on the model, and the contract prototyping house/small run manufacture we used said they could do the job, it was fine. No, it costs more, and is harder to verify, and was a poor design choice in the first place.
Those sorts of things happen because they've never run a tool, smelled hot oil, heard an unwanted vibration, or tried to field verify a design. They don't even know what they don't know.
(cont.)
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ReplyDeleteI'd get architectural drawings for ordinary office space dimensioned to THOUSANDTHS of an inch (because the software allowed it). I'd get drawings for assembly and layout without any angles dimensioned and no way to determine the relationships between objects in the room... and I'd be told to open the model on a computer and use the software to determine the angle. On a construction site. Under the gun for time. With a 7 year old laptop, and no installed version of the design software.
We ended up taking the "ratios don't work that way" guy into the field and on a jobsite to educate him. It slowed us down, p!ssed him off, and IDK what the customer thought was going on, but it did at least convince him to dimension his drawings.
It wasn't just on technical issues either.
We had to train new hires how to answer the phone politely. They had no understanding of the legal environment we worked under (general construction in the US, defense department classified and un-classified work), they had never been on a construction site, didn't know what the other trades did, or how it was organized. They didn't understand that there are existing fire, building, and life safety codes, or that OSHA and the ADA governed everything we built and did.
This is getting too long, and rant-y but the summary is that they were NOT prepared by training, education, or experience for the jobs they were hired to do. In general, they were not willing to believe that they didn't already know everything, or that standards, methods of work, and the legal framework of our society existed, let alone needed to be followed.
There were exceptions, and a couple of them were 'exceptional'. We identified those people and brought them forward as fast as possible. The others we worked around, put them where they could do the least harm, and got rid of them if we could.
Human babies learn about their environment by touching stuff, moving thru it, putting stuff in their mouths, smelling and hearing the things around them. For some reason, STUDENTS are expected to learn without any of that physical input that served them so well until elementary school. And that doesn't seem to work very well.
nick
I have an SB, MS, and ScD in chemical engineering. It is my experience that colleges, universities, and their graduate schools rarely provide opportunities to learn practical skills like the one you are talking about. They focus on theoretical knowledge and things that can be done by pencil and paper (or computer and printer).
ReplyDeleteMost engineering programs have abandoned their pilot scale facilities as being too expensive, too dangerous, and too hard to find someone qualified to staff them. And this has been true for decades.
I learned a huge amount after I went to work for a major petrochemical company and was an engineer with the responsibility for running a production plant. And most of it I learned from the operators, mechanics, and instrument techs.
I made a point the other day to some older people complaining about the younger - They are as we have taught them to be.
ReplyDeleteI have often wondered if there would be a market for a private school made of old folks (men and women) that would be willing to teach children discipline and work ethic along with the material including as much hands on as possible. (You can teach a lot of math while teaching carpentry, sewing and cooking) I have not been impressed with any teachers that I know or have met as an adult.
Anon 8:53 - Just because your dad can learn from reading doesn't mean it is optimum for everyone, there are different styles of learning. I've had enough technical education and experience that I can now read directions, translate them into action and fix something. The human body is much more complicated than any machine we have. Education is important, but learning how to mesh theory with reality has different challenges for different people. We haven't even discussed retention.
"hey're doing it in healthcare too. Doctor shortage has lead to increases demand for nurse practitioners. And many of these programs are entirely online. Patient 'assessments' are done by computer simulation. Think about this the next time you visit your GP's office."
ReplyDeleteMy wife is currently taking her nurse practitioner course online. All the lectures and test are indeed online.
But, the actual majority of her learning is coming from in person clinical training with preceptors of various varieties. She needs in the neighborhood of 180 'clinical hours' each term. With 'clinical hours' actually equaling out to about 1.5 real hours. She spends more time as a student in the hospital/clinic/med office than she does in any classroom setting.
Not saying it's all roses and unicorns though. She thinks her online instructors are shite and the program is bodged together. Like they crammed a real in person program online and changed as little as possible to reflect the differences between in person, on campus students and around the country, working for a living students.
The Karens have taken over education: everybody gets a trophy/degree.
ReplyDeleteI never took a chemistry course without a lab and advanced organic labs demonstrated quite clearly that the end product of a reaction was not necessarily what you read in Beilstein.
In human anatomy we had four to a cadaver and the exams were such that the matriculation/graduation ratio increased with each one.
And Jen, the Government was pushing for more nurse practitioners long before there was any major concern about doctor shortages; many in the government were looking towards Eastern Europe as a medical model for this country.
In 1987 I was dating a professor. Brought work with him one night and asked if I would help. Picked up a paper, 4 yellow sheets long. Kid started on first line and loopy far apart writing and the beginning sentence continued on till page 4. Nowhere in the 4 pages was a comma, period or paragraph. It also wandered with no point. I slapped a sticky on it with a F. When friend picked it up he looked at name and said I have to give him at least a C-. When I question why he said star football player and rich daddy who donates a lot to the school. My first introduction to the behind the scenes.
ReplyDeleteLater I was teaching a class in Fl. on a contract job and it was so they could learn how to put a file together and calculate income. This was 20+ years later and not one could figure out any income except salary. And sadly 3 of them did not know how many months in a year. Our school systems at work. Thank heaven I was hiring back in the 1980"s.
"willing to teach children discipline and work ethic along with the material"
ReplyDeleteThere's a local private high school that isn't paid for by the students. It's paid by businesses and other donations, and one of the things that they do is have the students attend in business-class attire, give them penalties for not behaving in workplace-like fashion (like being late or disrespectful), and at the upper grades, they have internships at local businesses.
This is set in a high-poverty area, and these are skills that it is likely they aren't learning from their families due to generational poverty. So they're not only getting a high school education, they're learning basic workplace skills such as showing up on time and doing the job.
You'd think those would be obvious, but apparently they're not.
Anyway. This school has a pretty good percentage of their students getting gainful employment, much like Job Corps in the same area. I don't know the college numbers, but that's less important than just getting these kids used to the methodology of working.
Just last year, an associate of mine working with homeless kids, all of whom were still in high school, had to be shown how to boil water so they could make ramen noodles. The reason this came up, one of the kids asked what it meant to boil water. If they don't even have that skill, how can they do anything but zone out on their smart phones.
ReplyDeleteThe things you pick up along the way.
ReplyDeleteI have a degree in accounting and high school was 50 years ago. I read "tolerance stacking" and knew what it was and why it was important. The only surprise is that it was referred to as a complex issue. Apparently, I should have pursued that engineering degree.
"...And most of it I learned from the operators, mechanics, and instrument techs."
ReplyDeleteThis!!! I worked as a support engineer for a large multinational and it was amazing how many how many recent graduates ignored or looked down upon the people on the floor. Those folks are an infinite fount of knowledge gained from years of experience.
Hi Peter
ReplyDeleteAn O/T and FYI
More sh!t!
"Founder says CIA & FBI control Wikipedia and made it “the most biased encyclopedia” "
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/08/founder-says-cia-fbi-control-wikipedia-and-made-it-the-most-biased-encyclopedia/
Quote
Quote: "The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country."
ReplyDelete"Yeah, some mistakes were made, but we meant well, so don't blame us."
--Power-tripping lockdowner already gearing up for climate lockdowns
"Later I was teaching a class in Fl. on a contract job and it was so they could learn how to put a file together and calculate income. This was 20+ years later and not one could figure out any income except salary. "
ReplyDeleteSome years back I was hired by a mid-sized client (2K employees) to design and implement an enterprise-wide data system (they had an independent finance system). This always starts with requirements and leads into a fairly complex requirements document - what is the system expected to do, with what inputs, what outputs, growth capacity, etc.
Running a business involves "dollars in, dollars out, the magic happens in between" and defining, quantifying and measuring that "magic' is the key component of business operation. These people not only did not know what their employee burden rates were, they did not know what a burden rate was. When pressed they did a Guzinta ("2 Guzinta 4 twice") by dividing their annual total employee cost by the total number of employees.
Sheesh.
I spent a week - at their expense - explaining burden rates and how to calculate them for different employee categories and functions because there's no other way to determine exactly where the money is going and what the return on it is within, and across, all the various departments. When the system went live and started generating reports they were astounded at seeing exactly where money was being consumed and the ROI - or lack of it - was.
And how far off their Guzinta was in actually computing specific costs of operation.
Not new. In AU the rot started about 40 years ago when higher and vocational education was privatised, in design if not practice. Profits to education providers became the focus at expense of educational outcomes. First thing to be eliminated from curriculum was expensive practical subjects and activities. Consequences are now often in media... teachers who have no idea how to manage a classroom, nurses who cannot care for basic patient needs, engineers who have never held a tool, tradies who can do complex trigonometry but can't figure what is wrong with the circuit or the car or the chiller.
ReplyDelete20 years ago when tha interwebs wuz shiney and new, I was having stand-up arguments with newly minted electronics and computer engineers about whether inductance and capacitance in cables affected digital transmission (they honestly believed no. there used to be this thing called analogue but it doesn't exist any more...).
Anyway, in school teaching and the trades, this deficit has been recognised and the most recent national trade training packages have been redesigned so that students must demonstrate they can do their trade to qualify, not merely know about it. As a trade trainer (teacher) I am delighted by this. I get to pass on the *skills* learned from 35 years on the tools, not just the maths. And a bunch of shonky training organisations must either teach their trades properly or be forced out of the industry.
This has been happening in the US Navy for at least the last 20 years. The technical schools were cut to the bone, replaced by computer based training and OJT. The problem there is that On the Job Training leaves out the emergency - you learn normal operation and maintenance, nothing more. The CBT may include some emergencies, but it's nothing like being taught recovery methods hands-on. Result - when the steering system messes up, the sailor on the spot can't fix it.
ReplyDeleteWhen son left the Army he decided to do something he'd wanted to for a long time, learn to be a machinist.
ReplyDeleteGot his first job before he finished the classes(oh yes, he finished them) and never looked back. I don't know about the later ones, but the first two places he worked, even though so much is CAD/CAM now, really preferred hiring people who knew how to manually set up and run lathe and mill: not only were they capable of making one-off pieces, but they were more knowledgeable of just how the things worked.
Rofl.....
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of tolerance stacking but just the name makes it obvious what it is. I actually looked it up after I decided what it meant and was right. I mean isn't it obvious that you have to keep track of the spaces in between every part to make sure the overall design is the right dimension to hold all those parts. Now let's talk about designing the correct tolerances to allow it to still work after thermal expansion or contraction. I love how people now wonder why something they buy says it will only work correctly inside a certain temperature range.
just to be upfront I am not a mechanical engineer and never have been. I just like designing and building things. Just because! :) I have been using tolerance stacking for years without realizing it. I will admit I have never paid much attention to thermal contraction and expansion in stuff I do but then anything I do doesn't have real tight tolerances.
I'm in my mid 50's now and after being hopeful most of my life that things were going to get better, have come to the realization that nope it's not going to get better and I'm frightened of what my kids are going to go through in the near to mid future.
It blows other kids and parents mind's the things my kids do on a regular basis from using knives and having their own pocket knife given at age 8. ( don't ever ever ever take it to school warning having to be given sadly) To being taught how to safely start a fire and safely maintain it and safely put it out. (my 12 year old went to a really nice camp that she could ride horses (which she already knew how to do), white water raft, play in the lake, plus a lot of craft stuff. The parent from our church that went with them flipped out when at a gas/food stop my daughter tried to buy a lighter. (I will admit that most everyone has said that they can understand a camp not wanting kids they don't know about having lighters.. ok... since I burnt the back forty on our ranch down at the age of 5 starting fires, I can understand it) lol.. but I pointed out that my daughter has access to pretty much any kind of knife ever made, lighters from BIC's too high tech 2000 degree butane specialty ones in the kitchen drawer and knows how to use them all. sigh... And because it is stuff we just showed her how to safely use it has no excitement or mystery to it. It's just something to use if she wants to or we ask her to build a fire in the middle of the gravel driveway or use the steel fire pit in the middle of the gravel driveway :) it doesn't happen often not because she couldn't do it but because it's more ho-hum....
I am not staying cohesive here... the point is my kids are taught how to do all the things kids are told never to do so that when my back is turned they actually can do it safely. They swim, climb trees, ride bikes, and skateboards, play sports when we force them mostly, use tools, explore the woods around our house, are taught music and playing instruments, drawing, pottery, archery, and other things :) as well as slingshots and blowguns. They catch snakes (only if they can identify them otherwise they come and get one of us) and as parents, we live in fear of something happening to them but feel it is worth it after seeing how unprepared to survive in any kind of environment a lot of their peers are. We also are constantly in fear of them constantly going to school with scrapes and bruises from living a normal active life will blow back at us in the insane environment the US has turned into.