Men's Engagement Manager?

[Pluripotent]

Yeah buddy, that would fill up really quickly.

I'd go... Maybe online CME then, for PT, physicians, etc.

[George Christiansen]

My guess is that private industry may have to get together and start setting up their own educational pipelines (Exxon, Shell, etc for engineers) for the jobs they need. They are likely to do a better job of getting kids the practical education/training they need to actually be prepared to step into the market place without the debt load.

I wish they would do this all the way down to middle school instead of treating every kid like some twisted cross between a babysitting project and a future valedictorian of Harvard. MOST of what they learn has ZERO application for the job and life they will ultimately have and, more importantly, it will all be forgotten by the end of summer anyway.

A shame though since I believe a broader education is valuable, but universities have become nonsense rather than broad.

There are lots of places, and more every year, offering free or very low cost classes for those who want to study the subjects that make up what you used to get with a University education before everything was just "advanced" high school and gender studies.

Or you can just discover interlibrary loans.

[George Christiansen]

It be pretty scary to have to go through a company like that because what if the job gets cut out? You have to redo your "education"?

It costs the original company money to train you.

The surviving competition will obviously have a large carryover to how they train their people.

It is easier to train the differences than to start form scratch.

[silachoo]

And this just started like, what, last year, right?

Since the dawn of man I would postulate.

[Andy Baker (KSC)]

It be pretty scary to have to go through a company like that because what if the job gets cut out? You have to redo your "education"?

That's happening anyways. Living in Houston I had a front row seat to what happened to our local economy when the price of oil tanked a few years ago. Most of the major oil companies and all of the major oil field service companies cut thousands of jobs. Everyone got dinged - engineers, managers, pipefitters, etc. I actually think companies might be less willing to cut people they had invested their own time and money into educating. I don't know though. I've never been directly involved in that world, but what I do know is that a lot of my clients have been in the oil / oil field services industry for 30+ years and most have the same observation of new hires - they don't know anything useful coming out of school and they are essentially a pain in the ass for about 2 years until the company can train them internally to actually be a useful. So that's my observation. To a degree, some of these companies are having to spend time and money already to educate their engineers. Maybe they could cut down the learning curve by bypassing the traditional university into something more direct.

Another component to this is debt load. Kids want more money than they are worth coming out of college. Part of this, I'm assuming, is that a $50K/year job is not that appealing when you have $100K++ in student loan debt. New hires might be more willing to accept the salaries they are actually worth if they had less debt coming out of school. Perhaps a more efficient private system could tackle this problem. Kids come out of college with less debt and can accept jobs with salaries more in accordance with their experience and companies can actually afford to hire them and keep them. Everybody wins.

Would it actually work in practice? I have no idea

[Pluripotent]

Apprenticeship works very well for many trades. Lawyering, carpentry, sports coaching etc. But not so much for medicine. The basics are too vast and voluminous for apprenticeship model to be effective out right. Doctors transition to an apprenticeship model. But I do agree that every form of education should transition to or at least involve the old school apprenticeship model. Once in a while I get to see (metrosexual?) mechanical engineers that are reluctant to get grease on to their hands!

My experience was that virtually all of med school and residency is basically a "time served" model. The vast majority of it is completely useless. Anything you learn, you learn on your own time, which they give you precious little of, because they're too busy cramming in more useless stuff. The latest "big innovation" in med school training was the PBL model (Problem Based Learning) which succeeds in wasting even more of your time since now you have to go to a group meeting for all your study time and pretend to contribute while being assigned "projects" to present to the group. Med school basic sciences could be done all online (the current lectures are really bad), then once you pass that, go to rotations which is the apprentice model. Residency is more interested in providing cheep labor for patients that Medicare/Medicaid won't cover to actually teach you much. It's basically a way for the hospital to make money off of the patients that they would otherwise get nothing for treating. So, it strives to be a type of apprentice model, but there are too many conflicts of interest for it to succeed. As long as graduate medical education is funded by Medicare, I see so good reform solution.

[Chris Lippke]

One of my customers is the head of engineering for a major petroleum company that we all know. We had this very conversation a few months ago. He has several $150,000-$200,000 positions he can not fill.

Do they have anything in the Chicago area???

It be pretty scary to have to go through a company like that because what if the job gets cut out? You have to redo your "education"?

To this and Andy's points.... I think it's this way just from working in a specific industry for so long. I worked heavy mobile equipment for 10+ years and wanted to break into the medical device industry. It happened, but all medical recruiters see is heavy mobile equipment, and of course they want the experience that ONLY the job that's being posted would give. [Blah blah typical pain-in-the-dick job search business]. It doesn't help that the recruiters are copy/pasting what the supervisor for that job writes up as requirements without being able to translate it to more general terms. I don't think the supervisors know enough about the details either in most cases. All this isn't even considering the present-day "traditional" job hunt techniques; I always feel like I'm missing out on a better way to hunt.

Once in a while I get to see (metrosexual?) mechanical engineers that are reluctant to get grease on to their hands!

Speaking as the guy who posted the other day about reducing callus buildup in the hook grip...
Black pants helps, and you gotta be careful with unions - better to ask before touching a wrench. To your point though, yes, engineers aren't required to have any sort of hands-on time. If you look at high school prep for any engineering, it would favor a 3rd calculus class over any shop class. And this is obviously to the detriment of the student. My mechanical engineering technology friend gave me a print for FSAE and told me to make the part. It may as well have been written in Japanese. I said I didn't know how (how to interpret the print wrt what the title block was saying, tolerancing, and definitely not how to machine the damn thing), and he looked at me like I was an idiot, which... I was. Meanwhile the shop boss doesn't want you in there breaking his bits. My other friend put threading callouts on what was supposed to be a clearance hole for this part he was making for a senior design project, and his professor berated him. How is he supposed to know when he's never had a drafting class or even looked at a print? And he's designing and detailing within in the first week on his first job out of college.

The education makes them less qualified for the job by: (a) emphasizing success as a grade point average and not necessarily knowing anything (drives you to memorize and cut corners rather than learn), and (b) taking time away from what they should be doing that would lead them to be competent, critical-thinkers in any industry. Having hobbies that make you tinker, cuss, and own tools helps. I think it's an all or nothing when it comes to the other engineers I know. One dude was a tank tech in the marines who works on old cars in his spare time (he bought the blue book a couple days ago, btw). Another one didn't know what a pushrod was. What do you do?

I don't have the answers, but I think it is also related to:

This is a regular trend I see for the American multi-national I work for. Whenever they have opening for engineering jobs, they're eventually forced to recruit either Indians or Chinese with work visas. An Indian colleague who's now an American citizen observed, "It's almost like every American wants to do some degree in humanities, become a real estate agent and become a millionaire double quick. Nobody seems to be interested in being an engineer, create value, produce goods etc.!"

I don't know a lot of Indians or Chinese that work with their hands, but as time goes on, I know fewer white male engineers that do either. A former Indian supervisor of mine once said, "I tell my two kids they can do whatever they want with, as long as they get a masters degree in some sort of engineering, preferably mechanical." That made me lol at the time, but then I realized that's what my mom landed on too raising us. Then, you just do your artsy shit in your off-hours. On the plus side, I do see a lot of youth getting into engineering and programs (like FIRST Robotics) getting kids into hands-on stuff right away. This breeds HUGE dorks though.

One of the problems is that we, as an American society, have convinced each other that a College Education is the gold standard, and it's not. It could be useful, and may be necessary for many professions. But in telling our kids they HAVE to go to college, we've explained that the alternative is having to take up employment in a "lesser" occupation, like a plumber, electrician, mechanic, welder, or some other such blue-collar trade. Without realizing it, we've relegated the skilled trades to second-class status, disregarding the fact that workers in those trades experience immense job satisfaction and often earn incredible wages. If I'd known in high school that welders can make 6 figures, my exploration of college curriculae would have been much shorter-lived, if it ever lived at all.

I've been hearing it swing the other way in some circles though. Just Saturday at the hospital I heard the charge nurse talking about pushing her kids into trade for all the good reasons you stated.

There are lots of places, and more every year, offering free or very low cost classes for those who want to study the subjects that make up what you used to get with a University education before everything was just "advanced" high school and gender studies.

The more that entities with money (businesses and companies) put value on the person and his experiences over the degree, the more this will matter. And it's easier than that even! You can watch tutorials on Solidworks (and everything else) for free on Youtube. If I don't know something, I Wikipedia it, and bam! Learned. Shit man, all of my new learning in the last few years has stemmed from Starting Strength: all it's articles, videos, book recommendations, reading Sully's suicide-inducing write-ups on inflammation... That Conceptual Physical Science book... best toilet book ever, and it needs to be required reading for every human being. And here I was a sophomore in engineering school learning about fucking lenses and concave mirrors for an A.

... what I do know is that a lot of my clients have been in the oil / oil field services industry for 30+ years and most have the same observation of new hires - they don't know anything useful coming out of school

*guilty*

And universities know they're not teaching anything cutting edge (at least in engineering a decade ago). "Learning how to learn." "Learning how to grind through difficult problems." That's what they'll claim to be selling if you really press them on what you're learning in their classrooms. I mean, I get it, but it also seems like they've just fully admitted to selling brain teasers and a piece of paper at that point.

and they are essentially a pain in the ass for about 2 years

*guilty*

until the company can train them internally to actually be a useful. So that's my observation. To a degree, some of these companies are having to spend time and money already to educate their engineers. Maybe they could cut down the learning curve by bypassing the traditional university into something more direct.

I like it, but this would depend on not just the type of work, but the kids knowing what they wanted, i.e. what industry they want to work, what location they want to work. I think part of it too is that a company looks at a degree as evidence for (***in theory***) the candidate possessing some work ethic and being trainable.

[LordBaelish]

United States universities are among most important institutions in the world. Why are they broken? Seems like it's just this one dude's job title that rustled all your jimmies.

If there's a better opportunity for our educational system to fit, hand-in-glove, with general enterprise, why doesn't it? It only makes sense to 'invest' in your employees if you have a guarantee that you're not just simply subsidizing the competition to poach those employees. Hundreds of millions of Americans on non-competition agreements would decimate productivity in anything but the very short-run.

I actually would favor taking a look at compulsory military service, and I think this would achieve much of what you are all after. It's important to make the distinction between this idea and increase in hostility, warmongering, which is not what I am suggesting.

[rgcone]

It be pretty scary to have to go through a company like that because what if the job gets cut out? You have to redo your "education"?

Well, absent the company charging for their training programs through "loans" which must be repaid by working for the company (aka indentured servitude, modern version), the market can take care of that. Many years ago I spent summers working in the Gulf oil fields. Many companies, like Halliburton, Baker Hughes, etc had training programs for the technicians. After some level of experience, other companies would recruit these techs. The military has the same core problem. Gazillions spent in training, but if all your pilots want to leave for an airline you best be thinking of how to craft retention schemes. Employer competition is good for labor.

The bigger problem is that politicians don't like "for profit" schools. Not enough opportunity for graft.

[Mark Rippetoe]

United States universities are among most important institutions in the world. Why are they broken? Seems like it's just this one dude's job title that rustled all your jimmies.

You see nothing wrong with institutionalizing this nonsense? It doesn't indicate a problem to you? United States universities were among the most important institutions in the world. They are rapidly becoming both irrelevant and a serious waste of time and money.

By the way, this is EatABoy under a new username.