• Question: How hard was it to get the job you are at and keep it? I feel like you have to put copious amounts of work to get the job, then the knowledge you have obtained is obsolete.

    Asked by 575spcq23 to Vinita, Rachel, Pam, Christopher, Brian, Andrew on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Christopher Youens

      Christopher Youens answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      It may have been a challenge to get the job, but that goes for any specialised industry. As for keeping it, it’s not cutthroat, you’ll find that people are generally willing to help and are always happy to share their knowledge and experience.

      As for knowledge going obsolete, that’s not really the case. The core principles remain the same and that knowledge really gets reinforced as you go on. On the satellites I’m responsible for they use processors that were designed in the early 1990s!

    • Photo: Pam Anderson

      Pam Anderson answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      You might have to work hard to get a job, but then when you get it you know that the company want you there. If you work hard, everyone in the industry is generally very supportive and you mostly work together within a team. As an engineer you’re always learning new things but your base knowledge isn’t obsolete…it just keeps being updated!

    • Photo: Rachel Hudson

      Rachel Hudson answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Actually it wasn’t hugely difficult to get this job.. If you have the right experience/ skills/ personality then the employers will be able to see that quite quickly and know that you are a good match for the role.
      You are right though, that you may spend lots of years in education or other jobs only to find that this specific knowledge you gained is completely irrelevant to what you are doing now… but don’t think that is no reason to do it!! The employers know that not everyone will start off doing exactly the same as what they will do in future and don’t expect you to know everything already (sometimes you won’t know anything at all, especially if it’s a really specific and niche area).
      What it will show them instead, is that you are passionate, hard-working, flexible, can work well in a team, dedicated, ambitious etc etc. These qualities can be shown through many different career paths or types of education :):)

    • Photo: Brian Weaver

      Brian Weaver answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      Many years studying at the university was required to get my job. Although it was hard at times, the difficulties were outweighed by the enjoyment of learning a very interesting topic.
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      That knowledge is not obsolete! You must use everything you learned in school (and on the job) to solve new problems. Without that prior knowledge, how would you adapt when things change?
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      For example, the same principles are used for positioning with GPS (American) satellites and for GLONASS (Russian) satellites. When the Russian satellites became available, engineers had to rely on their prior knowledge of the GPS system to include the new satellites in their solutions. The same thing is happening now with the Galileo (European) positioning satellites!
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      For a more recent example, the newest satellites transmit three signals instead of two. An engineer that doesn’t know how to position with one or two signals will have trouble using three!

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