Professional and Career Topics

Has your firm experienced success in training and maintaining EITs? 

How did you train them?

-Were they usually paired with more experienced teammates actively working on the same project?  Or were they expected to be able to work by themselves in isolation and only discuss when they have questions?  If they were working on a project in isolation and that was effective, how did you make sure they were making proper progress?
-What are the mechanics of giving someone a task in regard to training them before giving them the task or giving them the task and waiting for them to come to their peer with questions?
-Do you have an actual training program at your work for EITs?  What were the mechanics of the program?
-Were they assigned a mentor to meet with weekly?
-Does your firm host weekly learning sessions to talk about autocad civil 3d, hec-hms, hec-ras, stormcad, hydrocad, watercad, arc gis pro, etc. or to discuss general fundamentals and mechanics of engineering design?
-How many conferences do you send them to a year?
-Do you pair your EITs with a PE of 5-10 years of experience or does your firm have a large age gap and thus there is an EIT working with a PE of 20-40 years of experience who does not have time to be actively involved on the project?
-How has giving an EIT a project to do by themselves without being in a team, if they have never done that type of work before and have not been trained fully, worked out?

I am curious to hear your comments.  Thanks.

------------------------------
Sara McNeil EIT,A.M.ASCE
Corpus Christi TX
------------------------------

That's a lot of questions!  I will try to address them with one answer.

There is no task in engineering that is too difficult, advanced, or critical that is beyond that a recent graduate with a Bachelor's in engineering is not capable of doing.  Therefore, an EIT should be able to perform all aspects from start to finish on a project.  The PE who is working with the EIT is not a professor.  You might be thinking this is a bold statement and there must be caveats and you would be correct.

On that note, here are the caveats as I see them:

- Engineers check each others work regardless of being an EIT or PE.  The expectation is that the EIT's work has plenty of markups and the PE's work has minimal markups.  Both still get checked.  

- If a task is new or unknown, there are resources and colleagues you can point you in the right direction.  Don't expect anyone else to do your work for you.  This is the same for an EIT or PE.  Projects can be very unique, so don't think that you will encounter everything within the 4 year EIT period.  PEs still have questions and need to learn new skills.  All engineers are expected to be resourceful.

- A PE/supervisor should not ask an EIT to perform a task that they themselves cannot do.  In this position they can act as a safety-net for the struggling EIT, but not training wheels. This rule fosters respect between the mentor and the mentee.  

- In practice you are not presented with a text book word problem.  You need need to formulate your own problems and solutions.  You cannot learn to do this if the PE hands you a problem.

I have never worked for a major engineering firm.  But, my understanding is that even there, engineers often work independently.  The comprehensive nature of design means that typically one person is responsible for seeing it through.  Collaboration with colleagues happens through questions and checking.  Design is an iterative process. So even the best PE may have to perform trial and error several times.  I just submitted Revision 7 of a connection design that I have been working on for 6 months.  

All the seminars and college classes that I have taken never touched on the most important aspect of learning as an engineer.  To be an engineer you need to be able to give and receive constructive criticism.  A concept that seems more applicable where I learned it in video production in high school.  As a filmmaker your work is highly visible to all critics to be dissected standing alone as its own work without your commentary.  Your calculations/drawings/reports are exposed in the same way.  Constructive criticism does not ignore minor or major mistakes.  It addresses them both equally.  It does so in a respectful manner free of mockery, spite, or levity.  It is not a personal critique, but professional critique given with the expectation that you are responsible for your own work.  As you start your career as a first year EIT, expect to be more on the receiving end.  This is how you will learn to give it in the future.

The chief engineer I work for has always said: "I will be most proud of you when you are able to catch one of my mistakes."

------------------------------
Chad Morrison P.E.,M.ASCE
Professional Engineer
Greenville RI
(401)231-4870 EXT 2207
------------------------------

Sara, 

Being still an EIT I can say it depends. I will touch on your main question and try to answer the others along the way. 

I have worked for large corporate companies and now a small consulting firm, and I would say training looks very similar. Let me begin with my previous work at companies with 3000+ employees. There was no formal training, and I believe this is very common because you should already have most of the technical knowledge to do your job. There are obviously many design procedures and codes you are not familiar with as it is impossible to learn everything in college, especially if you just got a Bachelors. At my first job (technically an internship after college) I was given design tasks on day one, no training, no guidance. As engineers we should be able to solve problems, that is our job. I would say as an EIT there are still a lot to learn, especially the non-technical aspect such as construction coordination and applicability and there is where a good boss will be able to guide you the most. Similarly, at my current job, I was given design work on day one. I think the main difference between these two experiences was the fact that I was definitively given more responsibilities at the small firm since there were not as many people involved in one project. At the end of the day, you are responsible to do your own training, honestly, your boss or supervisor doesn't have much time to be teaching you, they are there to guide you through the process. I would recommend you check Access Engineering (an ASCE member benefit) for some great resources. 

At the end of the day we all learn differently, make sure you talk to your boss on what is effective to you. For me, I prefer getting into the project and try to figure it out myself, even if I make mistakes at the beginning or if it takes me more time. I know if I work on getting the answer it is more likely I will learn the procedure or concept much faster than if I see someone else do it for me. No matter the way you learn, one of the most important things I have found out in the 1.5 years I have been out of school is that the more detail oriented, organized, and most importantly, respectful of your bosses time you are, the sooner you will be given more responsibilities and also the more they are willing to help. Check this thread that talks about time management, you may find it useful. 

I am a firm believer that you should learn on the fly, it is really hard to teach problem-solving or attention to detail. You have to be your own mentor, I normally spend several minutes trying to figure out how to solve a problem before I ask for help, and even then I have an idea of how to solve the problem. The last thing you want to do is come to your boss with a problem and have no idea of what the solution may be. 

I would encourage you to create a learning plan for yourself. Depending on the work you do you may want to focus on technical or non-technical learning objectives. I know for me, it was the non-technical part, I had the technical knowledge but now I was faced with the challenge of making it practical and applicable to real-world situations. 

I hope this helps a little. I feel like it is a very open-ended question but I will be happy to answer any other questions you may have or even get in a call to discuss more.



------------------------------
Luis Duque EIT,A.M.ASCE
Structural Engineer
Broomfield CO
luis@...
------------------------------

Hi Sara,

Thanks for the questions relative to the "Care & Feeding of EITs."

 I deliberately choose this label to emphasize the reality that you have identified an early phase in the life cycle of an engineer's professional development within a professional engineering organization, be it private or public sector-centric.

 It will come as no surprise for us to learn that organizations will have their approach to this professional development phase as varied as there are organizations. So, perhaps it would be useful for this dialogue to set a general framework or context for organizational characteristics within which individual contributors can make their advice, opinions, and questions considered.

 Sara, if this makes sense for what you wish this thread to produce, perhaps you might collaborate with a few others, and then share a template responders can reference their feedback to within your thread.

 Some parameters to consider, but not be limited to are:

• Total firm size, number of offices, corporate form.
• General percentage of discipline staff, i.e. 12% Arch, 45% Engr, etc.
• Percentage Private vs. Public sector projects

 N.B. I realize some of this may be lame, given I have not done "Honest" engineering work for quite some time. But, I know you can understand and improve it, in the spirit of "All of us are smarter than any one of us!"

 Again, thanks Sara for surfacing a long overdue managed and led engineered process.

------------------------------
William M. Hayden Jr., Ph.D., P.E., CMQ/OE, F.ASCE
Buffalo, N.Y.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." -- George Eliot 1819 - 1880
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 05-08-2019 21:46
From: Luis Duque
Subject: How to Effectively Train EITs

Sara,

Being still an EIT I can say it depends. I will touch on your main question and try to answer the others along the way.

I have worked for large corporate companies and now a small consulting firm, and I would say training looks very similar. Let me begin with my previous work at companies with 3000+ employees. There was no formal training, and I believe this is very common because you should already have most of the technical knowledge to do your job. There are obviously many design procedures and codes you are not familiar with as it is impossible to learn everything in college, especially if you just got a Bachelors. At my first job (technically an internship after college) I was given design tasks on day one, no training, no guidance. As engineers we should be able to solve problems, that is our job. I would say as an EIT there are still a lot to learn, especially the non-technical aspect such as construction coordination and applicability and there is where a good boss will be able to guide you the most. Similarly, at my current job, I was given design work on day one. I think the main difference between these two experiences was the fact that I was definitively given more responsibilities at the small firm since there were not as many people involved in one project. At the end of the day, you are responsible to do your own training, honestly, your boss or supervisor doesn't have much time to be teaching you, they are there to guide you through the process. I would recommend you check Access Engineering (an ASCE member benefit) for some great resources.

At the end of the day we all learn differently, make sure you talk to your boss on what is effective to you. For me, I prefer getting into the project and try to figure it out myself, even if I make mistakes at the beginning or if it takes me more time. I know if I work on getting the answer it is more likely I will learn the procedure or concept much faster than if I see someone else do it for me. No matter the way you learn, one of the most important things I have found out in the 1.5 years I have been out of school is that the more detail oriented, organized, and most importantly, respectful of your bosses time you are, the sooner you will be given more responsibilities and also the more they are willing to help. Check this thread that talks about time management, you may find it useful.

I am a firm believer that you should learn on the fly, it is really hard to teach problem-solving or attention to detail. You have to be your own mentor, I normally spend several minutes trying to figure out how to solve a problem before I ask for help, and even then I have an idea of how to solve the problem. The last thing you want to do is come to your boss with a problem and have no idea of what the solution may be.

I would encourage you to create a learning plan for yourself. Depending on the work you do you may want to focus on technical or non-technical learning objectives. I know for me, it was the non-technical part, I had the technical knowledge but now I was faced with the challenge of making it practical and applicable to real-world situations.

I hope this helps a little. I feel like it is a very open-ended question but I will be happy to answer any other questions you may have or even get in a call to discuss more.



------------------------------
Luis Duque EIT,A.M.ASCE
Structural Engineer
Broomfield CO
<maskemail>luis@...</maskemail>
------------------------------