Can you describe the importance of continuous learning and professional development in the field of engineering?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Yes I am a big advocate of continuous learning and professional development.
When I joined by current team I saw a lot of great work done within my team and
org but people usually worked in silos. There were handful of senior engineers
and PEs who had a plethora of knowledge but that was not getting properly
channelled down mid/junior employees. I decided to start a brown bag series
every other week in the org where we will have someone sign up to share what
they are working on the team. We kept the talks to be informal so that there was
not a lot of obligation for people to create formal slides. They were free to
have a talk, reuse a document/slide they created, or just open a code block and
discuss. Worked with senior engineers/PEs in the org to drive first few sessions
start sharing their knowledge accross the team. Eventually started encouraging
the mid/junior level engineers to also present their work and slowly people
started to come up with topics of their own. Also started inviting partner teams
to talk about adjecent things and also PMs providing business impact of the work
the team is doing and roadmap. The team really looks forward to this series now.

Anonymous · Answer

Continuous learning is essential to keep oneself up to date with industry
standards. It will help individuals delve into the problems in a more robust
way. For example, to connect the data and provide a 360 degree perspective to a
subject, it would be great to have an in-depth understanding of different
database technologies to decide which one can solve the problem more
efficiently. Another eg. would be when to use REST vs GRPC Vs GraphQL. It's not
mandatory to keep changing the tech but if one is invested in learning and
knowing about things for how they work and what they can solve new opportunities
and discoveries could be made.

Anonymous · Answer

I did this with in our project when client requested to improve the overall site
performance. As a solution, I led the team to acquire new technologies which
accomplish this task.

Can you describe the importance of continuous learning and professional development in the field of engineering?

Answers