Continuous development and lifelong learning have become the new normal for fresh and professional engineers as their work and diverse specializations revolve around public infrastructure and safety, a sustainable environment, a highly competitive economy, healthcare, and security.
From in-house training, professional development programs, to workshops, and certifications, here’s how engineers are taking lifelong learning to a whole new level.
They Keep Developing Their Job Skills
In all the best engineering specialties, engineers must update more than half of what they learned and experienced every couple of years while juggling their full-time jobs and projects according to the best standards of the moment, which might change next month or in the future upcoming year. Let’s not forget that even in the slower-paced and more traditional fields of engineering, engineers must reinvent their job skills, both soft and hard, at least once a decade.
Industry Skills
Because engineers operate in a variety of industries, some hard skills are vital only to niche specializations; however, we can’t neglect the below hard skills that remain a standard in most engineering work:
- Computer Science
- Programming Languages
- Statistics
- System Design and Analysis
- Conceptual, Logical, or Physical Data Modeling
- Process Management
- Blockchain and Crypto Language
- Experimentation
- Design
- Key Performance Indicators Softwares
- Compliance
- Government Contracting
- Commercial Awareness, especially for product design
- Environmental Awareness
- Data Analysis
- Inventory Management
- Infrastructural Design
Soft Skills
- Emotional Intelligence
- Presentation Skills
- Team Collaboration
- Communication
- Negotiation
- Stress Tolerance and Adaptability
Types of Lifelong Learning
It must be noted that plenty of engineering companies and related businesses are currently setting up their own approaches and techniques to maintain and improve the competency of their employed engineers.
For forward-thinking employers, it’s about following a guideline that starts with a contract setting out the commitments of both parties to lifelong learning.
Big companies, for instance, can allow themselves to use their resources to budget and push the boundaries of knowledge of internal professionals.
As for SMEs, they rely on the resources they generate from day-to-day business activities, such as interactions with customers, suppliers, colleagues, and industry associations to boost their employees’ skills and experience; a more hands-on approach.
Lifelong learning can be done in various ways:
- Professional learning through the aforementioned day-to-day experiences with superiors, peers, and industry parties, ranging from meetings to on-the-job training, conference, reading articles, and networking.
- Master Degree in Engineering conferring the title of graduate engineer (ingénieur)
ESILV graduate engineering school in Paris is the only engineering school in France to include a true transversal approach throughout its programme. Inter-school cooperation is a pedagogical method that is possible with the support of two other schools located on the same campus: EMLV (Leonard de Vinci Business School) and IIM (Institute of Internet and Multimedia).
Its majors are continuously adapted to ever-changing economic trends to ensure that students are taught the latest, most up-to-date skills and knowledge with practice and real-work experience as the main focus to stay loyal to the lifelong learning mission. Major courses consider company and job market needs and are all entryways into the student’s desired professional occupation.
Never stop learning and growing!