​The Reason Engineering School Let You Down – And what TO do about it

Or: Should engineering be taught at university?

Do you ever think that your engineering degree didn’t fully prepare you to be an actual engineer? You probably should.
That’s because, on the whole, they were not actually trying to. No matter what they said or thought they were actually doing.
The good news. Once you understand where the system failed you, you can correct for it. You can become the engineer your degree should have produced.
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Let me explain all this.

Why universities don’t actually create engineers
Engineering academics rarely feel responsible for turning you into an engineer.
Their incentives lie elsewhere:

• deliver the course content
• meet accreditation requirements – something else we should talk about some time
• achieve acceptable student satisfaction scores – often the most important thing for promotion
• prepare students for the exam – also something important for promotion

None of these incentives demand that they produce engineers. They only require that you, the student engineer, pass.
This is not malicious. I always subscribe to Hanlon’s Razor. It’s systemic.
Many academics have never worked as engineers. Their understanding of engineering is theoretical, not practical. They teach what they know: theory, proofs, derivations, and the clean version of a world where every variable is stated and every problem fits onto a page.
But real engineering isn’t like that.
And that’s the heart of the problem – the prevalent ignorance in academia when it comes to engineering practice.

The shift away from real engineering
In my book, I went over the history of engineering education and how that has affected what and how engineers are taught – and how that would affect your engineering skill.
Engineering degrees once contained far more project-based learning.
Students sketched, built, tested, failed, iterated, and learned (although not specifically taught because it is hard to teach) how to think like engineers.
But during the space race, universities started adding enormous amounts of theory. There were genuine reasons for it—missiles and rockets needed deeper mathematics—but the long-term effect was that the identity of engineering shifted toward pure analysis.
Today, degrees still lean heavily toward theory. Project-based learning is expensive. It requires materials, workshops, technical staff, safety compliance, and academics who actually know how engineering is done. And the people making curriculum decisions often have little awareness of the engineering value of those projects – while also having budgets that they need to meet.
This leads to the situation we have now:
Engineering degrees that are perfectly aligned with academia… and poorly aligned with engineering.
In fact, it could be reasonably argued that engineering sits closer to  the trades, since engineering is ultimately about making the world better, while universities are designed to teach theology, philosophy, and science. From that, engineering degrees should be taught at more dedicated institutes. In his book The View from Here, Reece Lumsden noted that research into the career performance of engineers found that those who studied at more highly reputed universities did not enjoy the same career success.

An example that says it all
Think back to the typical exam questions you encountered.
You were probably given the exact variables you needed.
Not fewer.
Not more.
Just the right ones.
All you had to do then was find (or remember) the formula that used those variables and you could be 97.45 percent confident you’d found the “correct” approach.
Real engineering is never like that.
You never have all the information you want from the onset.
You often have extra information you don’t need.
Your first job is to work out which variables matter.
And often the fastest way to do that is to find the right model before you find the right formula.
That difference (between the tidy world of exams and the messy world of engineering) is why so graduates can feel lost when they first enter industry. And why some engineers might never become the engineer they could be – they were never shown how it should really be done.

What I saw as an academic
Most engineering academics today have little industry experience. They went straight from undergrad to postgrad to academia. If someone wanted to do engineering, then I think that they probably wouldn’t have stayed in academia. A science degree would have been a better option. So, there is probably also something about the kind of person who, today, chooses to be an engineering academic. They were maybe not really keen on the whole engineering thing in the first place – even though they did the degree.
When I taught engineering, I had the benefit of industry experience.
That meant two things.
First, I set design-and-build projects. Students then had to think like engineers. To apply judgement. To sift real data from irrelevant data. To design under constraint. To experience the outcome of the wrong decision.
Second, I deliberately included information that wasn’t needed in exam questions.
Some students hated this. I had more than my fair share of complaints.
But I still sometimes receive messages on LinkedIn from past students saying that my subject was the only one that actually prepared them for work.
There are exceptions. Germany, where industry–academia ties are deep and culturally valued, is a strong example of this. But these systems are unfortunately rare.

Good news, you can correct for the system’s failure
Let’s talk more about what you can do.
You might not have received the education you needed, but you can fill the gaps.
We now understand what project-based learning actually builds inside an engineer:

• the ability to frame a problem accurately
• the ability to think systemically about consequences
• the ability to reason from first principles

These three attributes – explained in The Global Engineer – are the foundation of engineering expertise. More good news. You can develop them deliberately, at any stage in your career.

Here’s how:
1. Notice when you’re framing
Every time you start a task, pause and check:
What exactly is the real problem here? What assumptions am I making?
Most engineering errors arise before the calculations even begin.
2. Map the system
Ask:
If I change this, what else changes? Who else is affected? What unintended consequences exist?
3. Use first principles routinely
Even though the way you were taught the theory probably does not help you apply it, put the extra effort in to finding the right theory and then applying it.
You can also practice these skills through:

• the exercises on my site
• analysing engineering decisions you see at work
• reviewing past decisions and identifying where framing or system thinking failed
• mentoring others, which reinforces your own skills
• studying great engineering achievements of the past

Once you know what to look for, everyday engineering becomes deliberate practice.

The bigger point: you aren’t the problem
If your degree didn’t make you feel like an engineer, it wasn’t because you lacked talent.
It was because the system wasn’t designed to produce engineers.
The good news is that the skills that matter most in engineering aren’t locked behind university doors. They’re learnable. Trainable. Practicable.
And you can begin strengthening them today.

The degree gave you the theory – even it was abstract.
Experience will give you the engineering – but not as much as you could have.
Deliberate practice will give you engineering expertise – if you choose to.