Best practices for learning on the job as a young professional in engineering

Question

Background: I am working in the electronics design department of a German power tool manufacturer for roughly a year now after graduating with a Bachelor degree in electrical engineering in late 2019.

I am not really pleased with the quality of my bachelor studies, because I feel like I am missing quite a lot of basics and am not able to build further knowledge upon the ones I have. This is really depressing to me.

To overcome this, I currently study a lot in my free time in the fields which I am coming across at work. Unfortunately though, I am not feeling a significant gain in understanding and increase in knowledge, which I am tracing back to my rather shaky fundamentals.

Apart from my free time, I try to implement the following techniques at work to improve:

• Ask a lot of questions to the senior engineers
• Dig deep into schematics and research online about their functionality if I do not understand them

Question: What best practices of learning on the Job and studying in freetime can a young professional follow, to increase knowledge and ability to learn new topics/strengthen basics?

Answer 1

which I am tracing back to my rather shaky fundamentals.

You seem to be doing all the normal things already and it's only been a year. Fundamentals are usually in the coursework, but quite often you find that it's patchy and a lot of what you studied seems irrelevant until you come across it if ever. This is perfectly normal, it's just to get your foot in the door.

I learnt most from looking up the functionality of the items I was working on or that interested me. More senior people can be helpful, but many of them are only experts on the specific things they've worked on, which is great because often that's what you need at a particular time, but doesn't broaden your knowledge beyond that.