Continuing Education for ET Professors

Every electronic engineer and technician must participate in some form of continuing education if he or she intends to stay competent, retain a job and grow personally. As an engineer, technician or instructor, you live or die by what you know. To be successful in electronics you must know the latest technology and apply it to benefit your employer and to your company's customers. In an article for Electronic Design magazine a few years back, I wrote the following: "If you're not involved in some form of continuing education, then you are doomed to suffer the consequences of ignorance, peer contempt, technological obsolescence and eventual obscurity...and then you retire early." Does this sound like you?

I suspect that most practicing engineers do engage in some form of continuing education. But from what I have seen, not many instructors or professors from community college AAS degree electronic programs do. I hope I am wrong about you, but I bet I am not. Why? If instructors and professors were up to date with the latest knowledge, then the courses and curriculum would not be so out of whack with the real world. To say that today's curriculum is skewed from reality and that the instructors are living in some delusional world of the past is really being too kind. I'd like to use the phraseology of popular comedian Lewis Black, but that would not be professional. But for those of you who have heard Black's routine, you know what I mean. I can only attribute the the poor state of the curriculum to lack of adequate continuing education and exposure to actual technician and engineering work. I realize that as professors you cannot actually go out and get a job to see what it is really like, but you could at least engage in some kind of continuing education that would keep you informed about what is important and what is not. And that, hopefully, would lead to more current and relevant courses and curricula. I am probably just dreaming, but I can hope can't I?

Magazines
Continuing education need not be all that hard or time consuming or expensive. The fastest and easiest thing to do is subscribe to some of the many magazines devoted to electronics and related subjects. Most of the good publications are "controlled circulation" meaning that they are free. You cannot complain about the price. If you are a professor and engineer, just go to the relevant website and subscribe. The best ones are Electronic Design (this is the one I write for), EDN, and EE Times. The first two come out twice a month, the other weekly. If you do nothing more than read these three, you will be about as informed as possible about what is going on with components, circuits, technologies, applications, and issues.

One of the absolute best magazines is IEEE Spectrum. You have to join IEEE to get it but that is a good thing. Worth every penny. If you join you will also find out about all the other magazines they have and all of the other educational products and activities just for engineers. Check out www.ieee.org.

Then you should also subscribe to the only remaining popular hobbyiest/experimenter magazine, Nuts & Volts. It is a monthly and not that expensive. But it has lots of good articles and hands-on projects many of which are suitable for labs. Other good magazines to which you must actually subscribe are:
1. Circuit Cellar--Great magazine about embedded controllers, interfacing, etc.
2. Popular Communications--For those of you who teach communications and RF.
3. QST and CQ--The traditional ham radio magazines. Good sources.
4. Servo--A magazine devoted to hobby robots by the publishers of Nuts & Volts. Excellent articles and projects.

There are a whole slew of other magazines, but these are the core. Just reading these each month will keep you on top.

Conferences
Another good continuing education activity is attending conferences. The educational conferences like ASEE and SAME-TEC (matec.org) are good, but I am talking about electronics- related events. There are so many that I cannot even begin to list them all. If you read the magazines, you will hear about these events. And yes, they are expensive. But the sessions, workshops, and exhibits are so overwhelmingly good that you will come away with a head full of fresh knowledge, a whole new perspective and lots of good ideas. I recommend at least one a year. Try to put the expenses for this into your annual budget. It is worth it, believe me. Just try one and see.

Books
Books are always good for updating yourself. You can get some of them free for evaluation from publishers. But most you cannot. You will need a budget for this too. Books got expensive and the better ones approach $100 each and many exceed that. Your best bet to find these is to go to Amazon and search by subject. Otherwise, go directly to the publishers lists. Some of the better sources are Elsevier/Newnes, McGraw Hill, John Wiley, IEEE, Prentice Hall, ArchTech House, Noble, Addison Wesley, and Cambridge University Press. If you buy from Amazon, you can often find a used copy for much less. I usually buy used myself when they are available. Most are still in good condition.

Seminars and Workshops
Seminars and workshops still occur from time to time. These are given by private companies and university continuing education departments and are very expensive. They are really good, but probably beyond your budget. For some cheap and even free seminars check out the major semiconductor manufacturers who give annual workshops. Examples: Analog Devices, Freescale, and Texas Instruments.

Webinars, free online seminars have become amazingly popular. Most are given by companies promoting their products. But don't let that stop you as all of them give basics and fundamentals and other useful information. And don't forget, that the real engineering world is nothing but commercial components and products. You live and die by your knowledge of them. A good source of webinars is the TechOnLine website.

Back to School
As for going back to school for an advance degree, I say forget it. Most of you probably already have a masters anyway. If you do not have one, it probably is worth the time, effort and money if you are not approaching retirement in a few years. You get a good return on you investment. Not so for a PhD, at least in a community college. It is nice to have, but you won't get any more out of it than being able to say you are Doctor so-and-so. Some people do it just for that. Anyway, check out the National Technological University who can give you a fully accredited masters online.

Online Learning
As I travel around for the magazine, I interview lots of engineers and executives. I ask them what they do to learn new things. They all mention briefly the things I mentioned above to some degree or the other. But...and here is the big secret.... most learn from the Internet. Busy professionals don't typically have the time to go to class for general education. Most have very specific learning needs related to the job, a current project or some future interest. Almost every one of these people gets that education informally with a Google or Yahoo search. Just type in the topic you want to learn, and voila', you get thousands of hits. Print it out, sort it, organize it, read it and then you know. You can give yourself a quickie education on virtually subject any time. It is fast, easy, and free. Give it a try.

An Experimentation Bench
One last thing. Personal experimentation. If you are a real tech, you probably have a bench where you still build kits, play around with circuits, fix defective products, etc. Nothing beats this kind of hands-on work. You can still learn a great deal by just doing practical real world experimenting. Get yourself a breadboard trainer, some parts, a DMM and a scope and play around. Play engineer as you were educated. If you don't have a shop of your own, do it in the school lab. It is fun and educational. Maybe I am just an incurable techie or geek....whatever...but I still do this.

And go learn something new.

Copyright 2006 Louis E. Frenzel Jr.