Ten Essential Skills for Electrical Engineers

NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS

Recent graduates have always been valued for their enthusiasm and creativity, and in better economic times were often seen as the future of the company. As a result, they were given some time to acclimate to their new job before being expected to do critical engineering tasks. But the combination of today’s result-oriented workplace and the fact that most recent graduates will switch jobs after a few years results in companies expecting new graduates to enter the workplace with demonstrable design skills.

This presents a dilemma for academia. It must give the students the breadth, depth, and critical thinking skills they need to be engineers, but in order to get hired after graduation they will often have to compete with the practical design skills of experienced engineers. Most engineering curriculums include practical design skills, but in nearly 30 years of interviewing students, the author has found that they frequently can’t demonstrate those skills in an interview.

This book addresses this dilemma. It consists of nine chapters of purely technical review followed by a chapter on interviewing strategies and thriving in the workplace. When the students read the chapters and work the problems they will get an infusion of practical skills and a strong reminder that the fundamentals of the EE curriculum can be used to solve nearly any problem they’ll encounter in the workplace. The text was written to be easily readable and the problems are straightforward, ...