In this special episode, Allen and Dan discuss aerospace engineering and the skills that are more important, relevant and evolving in 2021. As aircraft become more and more complex, work shifts increasingly online and remote, and companies push their employees to be more productive, what does the the modern aerospace engineer look like?
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EP49 Transcript – What Skills Do Aerospace Engineers Need in 2021?
you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection all right welcome back to the struck podcast on today’s episode we’re going to have a little bit of a different format kind of do a Q&A dialogue with Allen about the state of aerospace engineering and engineering in general talk about jobs and education and some of the different skills that are really important especially now in 2020 as you know the landscape is changing and communication digitally and in person rapidly changing and so we’ll kind of dive into that today so Allen let’s start um you know you have just recently hired a new engineer to the team so let’s start with some of the skills that you value today and then we’ll kind of double back um through you know your education and some of those skills that are maybe more valuable when you were younger and uh you know a young blood engineer but let’s let’s talk about your your new hire and some of the things that you are looking for in an employee it is unique in the aerospace world when you’re trying to bring somebody new on and we we are constantly looking for the best engineers we can find and so when we we come across one we tend to grab them and what do i mean by uh really good engineers what i mean by that is they have a couple of different skill sets uh what scott adams would call a talent stack so i want to steal that term but it’s a talent stack and that talent stack is uh things that are developed uh usually outside the office place uh and or the office environment uh from what i’ve seen um it’s a combination of one being able to work with others to play well on the playground right and that that you can relate to others that have uh you know have a little bit of fun but also be serious at the same time and uh negotiate right i think part of it’s just a negotiation in engineering is a lot of negotiation a lot of times and being able to do that and on top of actually having some engineering skills having the the book knowledge that you need to have an engineering degree and to do it well on top of having the ability to turn a wrench and to understand what it means to turn a wrench or have not be willing be willing to get your hands dirty if needed those those skill sets really combine into what i always feel is a very useful versatile engineering person let me run with one of those for a second so we’ve talked about boeing a lot on the show and in the past boeing did a lot more of their manufacturing in-house right they produced much more of the entire aircraft themselves now speared air systems those you know huge sections of the fuselage and and and with airbus also not just boeing you know you’re essentially getting huge pieces coming together to be assembled so i can imagine that if you’re uh an engineer for boeing and now you’ve got to work with engineers from spirit and everything’s got to be kosher everything’s got to fit snugly together with these incredible tolerances that’s where it seems like it you can’t just be the engineer because i know engineers have you know my dad’s an engineer they have the reputation sometimes of being you know just they’re at their desk and they’re really good at what they do but don’t talk to them right that’s sometimes the impression probably not fair certainly in many cases but um it seems like there’s probably more collaboration than ever with companies starting to outsource some of and use more vendors and suppliers is that true it is it it does force the the tier one companies the boeings air buses of the world to be in some cases almost seen as a spec writer you’re defining the operation of a system but the implementation of it happens down at a supplier and it it does sort of take you away from the hardware a little bit but it does put you closer to the certification work so it’s a different sort of skill set there it does it has changed it quite a bit i would say it’s changed quite a bit in the last 40-ish years maybe 50 years in terms of the engineers that were coming out of school um tend to get thrown on the assembly line for a while either or as a draftsman so they were doing a lot of drafting work and then that was translated into doing some assembly work working with the manufacturing floor to then once you get through this little apprentice stage then you were sort of brought up into the world of quote-unquote engineering where you’re doing some analysis work and design work those that there was a normal progression in that in fact when uh my wife and i both started work at general electric years ago that’s exactly how he designed it they designed a system where you would work in manufacturing for roughly six months you’re working in design for six months you’re working in program management for six months so you go through this sort of rotational program similar to what amazon is doing with their blue origin rocket ship program it’s got the same sort of program set up because you just don’t know you don’t know what all that stuff is you don’t know how how somebody manufactures anything until you actually do it and for some engineers they never have that opportunity they’re just immediately brought into analysis design spec writing and they’re not hardware people it’s a big divide it is a big divide if you don’t understand how the the parts are built or or what the what the constraints are in in a particular design to make determinant paper drawing or computer drawing into reality you’re missing a whole lot about the process and missing a fun part of the process so you’re definitely starting to see that dichotomy happen where you don’t necessarily get the experience on the manufacturing floor or drafting making drawings you just don’t have that it either is you’re in analysis or you’re a manufacturing engineer and never the two shall cross both are good you need both i mean you really do to be effective you just do well and obviously i’m not an engineer uh but when you’re drawing all these things and you’re making them in whether it’s computer automated design or whatever you know software system of course back in the day i’m sure there was a lot of paper um but you’re obviously drawing things that exist in real life so you’re putting in a spec sheet or in a drawing a bolt that exists in real life i mean how much do you have to have familiarity with that specific bolt like for you with your radome designs you’re constantly talking about it has to be a you know a quarter inch bolt it’s got to be a number number four it’s got to be this it’s got to be that i mean how how often do you have to hold those in your hands to really know what you’re drawing up i i think it helps a tremendous amount to know those things and oh the the engineers that have worked previously outside of aerospace can be really useful in that so if you’ve designed construction equipment or you’ve been in the automotive world or you’ve been in the tractor world or farm equipment world which is sort of the area of the world that i come from if you have those little skill sets you know what a quarter inch bolt is you know what a half inch bolt is you know what its yield is how much strength it has and there’s different qualities of bolts that you can buy those are really useful skills if you’re designing something in which the bolt matters right and cost matters also you can use a cheaper bolt in some cases right all those little nuances that come to engineering are big in terms of being a successful company if i buy the wrong bolt and the thing breaks i’m trouble if i buy a bolt that’s way too expensive and it costs too much to produce i’m in trouble right so you it’s hard to conceive of the all the little trade-offs that happen at such a micro level every day but they dramatically change the bottom line and i think watching it’s it’s going to be curious to watch here uh with the electric vertical takeoff and landing companies that are spooling up because they seem to be wanting to spool up people and are trying to hire people that are like senior people and at least at least that’s what they’re advertising right now so if you go on linkedin you see all these ads for the most senior person in the world that knows how to do this one particular thing that’s great and you you need those people but you also need those people that are very skilled but maybe not as have as much experience uh that are in that learning process a little bit still because they’re the ones that can really make or break you the the the people leading the the charge are are very important we got to go in this direction on this particular kind of design but the the implementation happens way down here at a much lower level and you can really make a breaker company at those lower level decisions because they accumulate over time and that’s what your final product is is the accumulation of these little decisions that are happening at such a micro level that the management never sees it you just don’t see it all they see is a dollar sign and a time to build at the end well those decisions were made months ago by someone who may or may not have their the adequate skill set to do it and that’s it so it’s just in this engineering discussion of there there are a lot of engineers who have those particular skill sets i don’t see them going for to work at these electrical electric vehicle companies which is odd uh because you need them you really desperately need them there are there are a lot of people that have those skill sets that you wouldn’t think of that will make a dramatic impact on the performance of a aircraft um that unless you have them in house you realize how valuable they are and unless you’ve done this before you don’t really realize it so i i you know from an engineering standpoint if i’m if i’m coming into a new place a new engineer say i’m coming into a new aircraft company i haven’t been in before what am i looking for to see if these this company is really going to get to the finish line i’m looking for bright smart people at the top is in terms of group leaders but i’m also looking for that that talent stack those those people that really understand some hardware have some experience since maybe another industry uh but have been in aerospace maybe maybe at least a year or two typically that that can quickly pick up a skill set and move with it that’s what you’re looking for because you’re going to get thrust in all kinds of different situations it’d be like um as a school teacher and that sort of the analogy is exact but in a schoolteacher situation you have to be able to teach math and gym yeah you have to do both of those in an engineering world you have to be able to design a piece of equipment and explain how it gets assembled to the person on the on the floor that skill set something gets overlooked like if you can’t explain to the person who’s actually similar part how it’s supposed to go together then i’m not sure what use you are to this company because the person is going to make us a dollar is the person on the floor assembling the part if they can’t do that then what are we doing and that’s that’s where yeah those little those little subtle skill skets like communication really play into it well i want to double back to that but i also want to go with something that i heard uh in a recent evtol podcast uh by aviation week where they’re talking about this whole space and how you know there’s a lot of companies that are not going to make it to the finish line and there’s a lot of companies that have designs that are just probably not going to come to fruition that are just maybe you know like hey this is what we’ve got but outsiders are like that’s not gonna work and the the comment that i like your take on was one of the uh the members in this in this episode said well you know when you’re paid well enough sometimes you’re essentially paid to be insulated from outside opinions to essentially look past the fact that this might not work that if you’re paid well enough you’ll say we’re going to keep going even though maybe this you know we need some descent in the team i mean is that a regular thing you’ve been on a lot of different aircraft projects and i’m sure outsiders could be like that project’s doomed it’s not going to work that design is not good but yet everyone on the team really smart people really good engineers are still chugging away and it’s like how do they not know that this might not work how do they not see these glaring problems can you be paid well enough to to essentially miss or overlook or look past problems like this is that a thing sure it is and i’ve always felt like the more that an engineer had kids and a spouse the more likely they’re they are to overlook it and keep you need to keep the bus running right you got to keep things moving forward you got to keep collecting paychecks to pay for the mortgage and the schools and everything else that’s going on and the the ones that seem to have the the least vested are the ones that tend to be the most critical and i always took that with a grain of salt because you get the the new person into an aircraft company that doesn’t have a spouse or kids and um has a maybe has a good set of skill sets and they can be super critical right it can be super critical like this is the dumbest way to assemble an aircraft what do you hear a lot and it probably maybe is not the best way to assemble an aircraft but it’s a way to assemble an aircraft that makes money and and we’re doing it so you know maybe you take that with a grain of salt everything’s difficult you can make a lot of tough decisions you may not make all the right decisions you may not may not be able to make the decision you want to make but um if the company’s profitable at the end of the day then they’re doing something right it’s a very very very difficult industry to be in to start off with as we’ve seen from the multiple affairs of aircraft companies it’s hard and i i i do think uh there are times i’ve seen in my career where you know clearly if you’re all sitting around the the water cooler and you’re really talking about are we going to be able to make this airplane a reality
most engineers are right on point like this is going to be very difficult or there’s no chance or you know they have a pretty good sense of it they see it they see how fast it’s progressing they see the difficulties they had they’re they’re pretty observant but whether they can bring themselves to yeah you know to acknowledge that in front of management’s a different thing yeah it brings to mind an example that i have with this so i i met a person who was on like the content team for this upstart sports league which is still it still exists it’s like two years old now and you know me having a pro baseball background this league was like women’s softball and a couple other women’s sports and it was a really unique um business model where they were changing some of the rules it was kind of complicated to understand like why this league was different and uh we were talking about some other strategies and some of my skills where it overlapped and she was like well would you maybe be interested in consulting with us and none of this came to fruition but as i was thinking about like you playing it out of my head i’m like all right i go i go there and i give this presentation really what i thought was this is gonna be a huge failure i don’t believe in this at all like i i played ball long enough to know that i just don’t think this is a good idea and i don’t think it’s gonna work i don’t think the market’s there i think it’s a complicated idea basically and so my i was thinking to myself i’m like what if they paid me x amount of dollars do i go in and say hey here’s 11 reasons why this is a a ship destined to sink like no you don’t do that because they’re paying you not to do that but like what if that’s really really the opinion is it does anyone want to hear that um obviously that’s not what they’re paying for they’re paying for how to get there yeah to get it to get it going but in the back of my mind it’s like yeah i guess i guess they probably could have paid me enough where i could have just like given them my best effort while still knowing in the back of my mind that i don’t i don’t believe this is going to work at all which i still don’t i i don’t of course wish this company any ill will but i’ve seen a lot of sports leagues including teams that i’ve played for fold financially i know how hard it is just like you know how hard it is to make an airplane i know how hard it is to support a miner league baseball team and then we’re talking about other you know again so but neither here nor there but um but yeah so i have a little experience with it it is similar it’s very similar so so you have a lot of companies out there like that now um i mean does any of the management do they know that are they looking for people who are just bright and high and bushy-tailed and like hey let’s let’s give it our i mean do you have to have a certain personality to take on one of these aircraft like you were on the horizon project which ended up um or um you have a lot of familiarity with that project yeah and eclipse yeah eclipse and i’ve done a lot of different aircraft programs some that have been successful some not uh has there been a big differentiator between the two cash will change everything having enough money to to get over some of the technical hurdles is huge and also if you think about it and this is a hard thing for engineers to think about but the marketplace like who’s going to buy this thing what are they looking for engineers get pulled away from the customer stuff quite a bit in aerospace i say they’re much closer to it a lot of other industries haven’t worked in a lot of other industries but the customer is so far removed from the aerospace engineer typically that you have a hard time relating to what features they will pay for and what they’re not going to pay for yeah right it’s it’s hard to um put a value on that sometimes because you’re just like with the sports leagues right you have to you know the the the reason a sports league exists or doesn’t exist comes down to the customer what does the customer want yeah who’s watching it right are they willing to pay for it how much are they willing to pay for it and how often are they willing to pay for it that same thing exists in aerospace right how many airplanes are you possibly going to sell and are they going to buy a second one or a third one or is it or is it just a one-off purchase and they’re done forever who knows right and it does make a difference on the way you design the aircraft of how much emphasis you put in i’ll give you a good example how much emphasis do you put on the interior of an aircraft does it really sell an aircraft like do you have an upgraded interior does it make a sale i think in general the answer is yes it totally makes a sale whether the aircraft has a lavatory in it or not can make a sale uh stuff that if you’re designing the wing of the airplane you would wouldn’t even care less about but the person is buying the aircraft cares a lot about that and those things can get tossed the people that do the lavatories and airplanes are somewhat seen as second-class citizens in a sense in the engineering world because they’re not designing the aerodynamics of the airplane but i swear to go i swear to you more airplanes are sold on the interiors and the amenities on inside the aircraft than the then how far they fly and and yet that’s not where the emphasis lies yeah well in restaurants you see the same thing i mean how many people you know women especially who have to you know us men the only difference is we don’t have to sit down right a lot of times um bathroom cleanliness is a huge thing so if you go to a restaurant they have a disgusting bathroom do you does your wife want to go back there probably not right i mean that’s that’s a huge a huge thing and we’ve also talked about the solera 500l yeah and the blimp awkward shape of it and you know some youtube comments of the show or like who cares you know if it flies no one cares but to your point you think it does matter because ultimately it has to have to sell the aircraft um especially in contrast or in contrast with uh you know something like the honda jet which i know you think and i agree is a really beautiful looking jazz and also very efficient even if it’s not as efficient as the solera 500l it’s a it’s a handsome looking aircraft right that’s something that you’d be proud to hang your hat on no matter who you are right right right and and yet it seems to get pooh-poohed quite a bit in terms of aircraft sales er and i know there’s there’s always it’s just like in car sales right there’s always the person that’s looking for the most economical car and there’s also a person looking for the fastest car and there’s also a person looking for the most luxurious car what is your clientele who are these people and what are they likely to buy and what are those features that you need to have in there and it you can win or lose a sale on an aircraft for very small stuff especially on the secondary market it’s very hit and miss and as an engineer i think that we get removed from that a lot of times that and that’s a struggle and i always wonder if these retail companies are in tune with that in a sense of what does that customer experience look like and who’s driving that and how does that translate down to the engineering at all does it does it even does it even translate down i know a lot of aircraft companies i’ve been around it’s translated in the sense of this uh we got to have this it can’t be more than this amount of weight and it’s got to go this fast after that you’re pretty much left up to whatever you need to go do to certify it and and you’re like wow okay there is a lot more detail than that and it we’re always sort of left out of that conversation and i yeah and so and and i guess you know how that relates to uh being a new engineer and coming to the marketplace one the the difficulty right now if you’re coming out of school let’s just say you’re graduating in spring of 2021. bad timing but i think there’s there is some uh things you can do to increase your chances to to kind of get in those aerospace roles a little bit one and obviously have some communication skills too uh have some hands-on skills be able to turn a wrench in three have those sort of analytical skills and be smart be be able to grasp new skills and make those things happen the question is whether the aircraft companies and aerospace companies even value that because the way that the hiring is happening right now is hiring it’s sort of hiring by ai and that you send in a resume and it’s looking to scanning all these your resume and it’s looking for these keywords and then it sorts these into little buckets here’s my advice on that whole nonsense is i there’s a human resource group there for a purpose and they do serve a very valuable purpose in that there’s particularly now if i’m if i am tesla or amazon or one of these big cool hip companies right now i am probably getting flooded with hundreds probably hundreds of thousands of resumes right now how do i get around that how do i get through that hurdle of stuff contacts i mean person-to-person contact is a way to do that and there’s been many times that i if i find a project that i want to work on i’ll just go to the head of engineering and send them a note just do and say hey i’m interested in helping you guys out when do you need help and here’s my resume and here’s my resume right that kind of thing sort of skirts the hr issues and the automated scanning services that happen there knowing somebody that works at one of these aircraft companies or aerospace companies is usually huge and have a connection there is big and i think there’s so much um there’s so much talent today coming out of a lot of really good engineering schools that i don’t know if human resources in general knows what those skills are skill sets are that they need to pull into a new aircraft company so if i’m if i’m an hr person at one of these evtel companies and i haven’t built an aircraft before and i’m an hr person outside of the aerospace community do i know what talent set i’m looking for right now i don’t know would you i wouldn’t know like if i got thrown into the fashion industry and i said okay i need to go hire fashion industry experts to help us design some new um fashion line i would have no idea where to start right well why is that same thing not exist on the aerospace side where are you going who are you going to grab i mean what key places are you going to go focus on to find talent and i mean a real talent sort of like baseball right trying to find real talent is hard i’ll tell you how ge used to do it and i thought this was a really good way ge used to have a feedback system where they’d hire engineers from all over and then they look at how the performance ratings were internal to the company and they try to correlate performance ratings with schools and then they would rank those schools on a tier system so our best performers come out of let’s say it’s harvard i don’t know says purdue let’s just purdue because it’s engineering school so our best performers come out of purdue i’m going to hire purdue engineers as much as i can in fact i’m going to pay them a little bit more out of school but the engineers coming out of you know uh paducah state or something are really good but they’re not as good as purdue so i’m going to pay them at a slightly lower tier level to come into to come into ge so when you went to work for ge at the time this is back in the 90s you got paid on where you went to school not what your resume was you got paid where you went to school it was a very interesting way because you didn’t realize at the time when you were hired you didn’t realize that was happening to you first off that your salary was set before you even signed a contract they knew what they’re going to pay you and you could take it or leave it but you also over time you kind of figured out like where they were grabbing talent from because they they actually had a feedback loop on it and uh the the schools they were grabbing uh uh engineers from wouldn’t have been and necessarily in u.s news and world report in the top ten
fascinating right yeah fascinating well that that also has parallels with the sports world and like in especially in based in baseball the major league baseball draft is a is a crap shoot right even of the the first round which these are all guys who are getting a million plus dollars as a signing bonus the best players in the country only 50 percent of them even spend one day in the major so you say okay how do we find players who are actually going to become major leaguers um you know and you start to see well okay this school has produced 20 major leaguers in the last 10 years and this school which wins more games plays in a better conference has only produced four what’s the divide and you start to realize well the culture there and the coaching staff and some of the things that they’re doing that maybe we don’t even know what they are are resulting that these guys can handle the minor leagues and ascend through the ranks and outcompete other players and you see that at some programs where like vanderbilt’s a good example and of course they are one of the top programs in the country but vanderbilt pumps out major league players not just draft picks but like guys make it to the top that fight fight through and so you’re like well what what’s the x factor that they learn at vanderbilt well mental toughness yeah you know whether you know stick-to-itiveness whatever it is there’s a there’s a cocktail of things that are probably largely intangible that are coming from only that that group that’s helping guys fight through the really challenging times in in the minor leagues and i’m sure that’s the same thing in engineering like you talk about how what a grind it is when you’re you know away from your family and you’re just you know burning the the candle at both ends and it’s unclear how you solve a problem that you’ve never saw before that’s that same kind of grind right and i think some schools are probably going to prepare you more for that than others yes oh i i think definitely so i i obviously i’ve been around a number of engineers from all across the world and you do find these pools of places that you wouldn’t normally expect um based on location or a variety of other factors that you think man i wouldn’t have expected that place to have such a very a very talent filled group of engineers that are coming out of there consistently it’s it’s it’s not what you expect i think a lot of times it’s not what you expect it’s not uh necessarily ivy league schools doesn’t tend to be i mean those obviously are very very very bright people go to ivy league schools i’m not one of them uh but i i think until you’ve sort of been in industry for a while you don’t really see that and see where the the talent comes from and it i think it’s some part uh what is taught in the classroom that’s a big part of it but i think it’s all those sort of intangibles like yeah are they getting with hit with hard problems in the classroom are they are they able to work on uh real world things are they able to assemble things are they getting their hands dirty a little bit are they able to go from computer to the real world are they are are the things they’re building competing against somebody else or another college just so they can see where they stack up at those little things do add up over time and they are the intangibles they are totally the intangibles and you’re right dan like if i’m on a minor league bus as a baseball player that’s that’s hard that’s hard that’s that’s just flat old hard living and unless you can tolerate that part of being in baseball or you can tolerate the fact that yeah yeah you don’t get the 10 million payday no you know you’re not eating well you’re not sleeping well right i mean those kind of come along with it uh it’s the same thing can kind of exist in engineering and there’s been many a nights where it’s been you know working all through the night and the weekends and all that kind of stuff and if you’re not willing to do at least a little bit of that you’re sort of missing out on the fun part of engineering but it’s also the all the things you you learn when that happens and it does take a certain kind of skill set to do that it does well so my last question for you is what makes a successful engineer so like we talk about you know a minor leaguer becoming a major leaguer but in the engineering world like engineers are very highly sought after they’re well paid um but what’s the if you’re not a good engineer or you’re a lesser engineer than someone else do you lose your job i mean are there starving engineers somewhere or do you just not get to work on the best projects i mean what does it look like climbing the scale of engineers because i i don’t know what that what that looks like i think there’s a wide variety of people and a wide variety of what uh engineers deem to be fun successful careers there’s a broad spectrum of what that even looks like uh i i i’m not i i would say i i would say probably the biggest skill set which is probably the most difficult skill set for a lot of engineers is the communication side you need to be able to write well and if you can’t communicate via writing and then you’re just gonna have a hard time getting anywhere because if someone can’t take your input read it quickly absorb it and move on to the next thing then you just lost them and that piece of communication is probably the hardest part probably one of the least hot things in engineering school even today is ability to write clearly and communicate technical concepts at a level that a manager who may not be an engineer could grasp uh that that’s a that’s a skill set but in terms of um you know how to sort of are there engineers that don’t that aren’t successful i i think that is probably the largest the largest piece over time is the not being able to adequately communicate the concepts and that i’m not talking about using flowerly language and engineering writing is totally different than reading the wall street journal right and it’s totally different than reading the new york times or the washington post or san francisco chronicle or any of those other things it is a totally very unique subset of communication that only engineers can understand and so you’re until you’re in it or done it it’s hard to explain but it’s probably the thing that sets back most engineers from from having uh very fruitful careers and then they may be technically geniuses but if they can’t explain it they’re stuck and that’s one of the things that happened to me early in in schooling i transferred schools halfway through my engineering career and i got hit in the back of the head as soon as with the club about writing and communication skills and this the second school i went to where i finished up at what made a huge emphasis on writing and be able to communicate and i came into it cold a little bit because i was essentially into my sophomore beginning my junior year coming in sort of as a transfer student and all the other students said i already had two years of it and i’m coming in and whammo your writing needs to get better it needs to get clear needs to be more direct it needs to have a certain flow to it it needs to be shorter it needs to have more common terms used and until you do that for a while you don’t realize that yeah everybody else’s stuff is everything else everybody else’s compositions or technical reports are way better than mine why and that’s really helped later on in life honestly is that you don’t really lose that skill set once you just hone it over time so when i’ve gone to i don’t know i pick a part of the world that i’ve been in um and i’ve talked to engineers though the one thing about finding about the engineers that seem to kind of get to those leadership roles is the ones that can explain themselves and can write if you can’t write you’re in trouble and and i think as an engineer coming out of school and if i’m if i’m hiring somebody i want to i want to know they can write a little bit i want to know they can communicate to me because it’s not always going to be a presentation form and i know we’re already dan you want along everything’s in this powerpoint youtube instagram format today but that doesn’t translate very well like that doesn’t go into an engineering file for a person a year later to pick up like i don’t make a youtube video on how i uh put this wing on an airplane right i have to have to create uh something that i can pick up a year from now and read and understand quickly and grasp the concepts and implement a year from now and until every everybody has that i’m just not sure you’re ever going to get to the point you want to get to in engineering it’s sad to say but it’s true and i’ve seen a lot of engineers from really really really good schools not be able to write it’s a shame because you know inside that head is a genius that they just can’t get it out yeah and as we wrap up it’s um it’s definitely something that is starting younger and younger where that’s that problem is being exhausted exacerbated because teachers don’t want to put red ink on a kid’s paper for self-esteem issues for other issues sometimes it’s policy they can’t use a red pen oh yeah and a lot of times kids and parents will complain that why did my son get a get a c why do my daughter get a b minus on this paper it should be graded for content not for grammar and for writing which i think is utter hogwash you know as a as a philosophy major yeah it’s true my papers got marked up a lot and i found it and there’s still this one moment from my high school career with a humanities professor who was very influential in my writing who i got a paperback i have no idea what the paper was about but it was like a you know a humanities class so and he was an english teacher as well so he was always a hard creator my paper was covered it was like covered in blood it was just covered in red pen but i got a b or something like a b plus and i’m like these two don’t seem to jive like you look at all this red and you’re like i got i got an f or an e which they don’t give f anymore um but no i got a good grade but he just corrected stuff he’s like this paper was good but like you’re a high school writer so this is you know agreement error agreement error agreement error like all these different things that were just mostly grammatical helping me be better and i was like oh okay i didn’t do poorly i just these are ways to improve my writing right and even in college they don’t mark up papers they just they don’t they don’t do it very often so yeah i think it’s i think it’s a growing problem i think it’s funny how the world comes back around because for people like me who have a useless degree i’ve heard it my whole life what were you going to do with philosophy i didn’t know but 10 years ago everyone’s saying oh the humanities are dead i think even barack obama was talking about how you know trades you know trade skills are the important way to make your living in the future which is still valid but there’s a lot of more emphasis on people that can join an organization and think critically and write well and communicate well which are some of those abstract you know humanities degrees or liberal arts degrees it seems like they’re coming back because again those skills aren’t taught so some and you know obviously i’m not going to film an engineer’s role but my skill set could be used here or there like you know all sorts of places where we just need someone who can communicate well yeah and we can teach them how to do the other stuff like you said you we can teach someone to learn software but please teach them to write in college please so we can teach them the engineering stuff but we need them to know that before they come here my my father um who recently passed away was one of the best writers that i’ve been around and he got his college degree he was the last person in my family to have a college degree so he learned i think how to write by reading and trying to pick up that skill set on learning how to write i mean that’s something that it can happen in college but it can obviously happen outside of college too and it’s it’s a skill set that can be learned over time it takes a little obviously it takes practice like everything does but in terms of uh putting together and what my father would describe as you have to tell a story and as an engineer you’re like huh like i’m just trying to explain how to put this bolt into this part right it’s not that complicated well if you tell it in a story format it makes it a lot easier for other people to read and understand and he was right he’s totally right on that uh and if if reading things that he put together and i would i would send um social stuff for the company to him all the time to review and to look at and it would come back all read and it’s like hey you know tell the story tell explain how what’s happening it’s not i know all this stuff is technical and you’re doing really cool stuff but you still have to explain it in terms of people can understand and you have to put in a format that people are used to seeing and this the story format for me was always the hardest thing to get through because you just want to get to the answer like hey i found this cool answer look how well this thing does yeah but no one gets that far because you’re not telling in a story format and i i’ve always felt like that was a huge advantage to know that up front like let’s explain things in a story form and as engineers that’s one of the skills that you just don’t have you know it doesn’t come naturally to you because it’s all about the cool thing it always is but the story is huge and as a skill set and one of the skill set that i think engineers need to acquire hopefully earlier rather than later is to be able to write and tell things in a story format well we hope you enjoyed this episode obviously a little bit different than our usual format but we want to kind of go off script talk a little bit about the uh the engineering world today so if you’re new here thanks for listening or watching be sure to subscribe to the show on youtube spotify itunes stitcher wherever you listen share it with a friend and we’ll catch you here next week on the struck podcast
