Knowing and Not Knowing

I am thinking of sharing this thought following a recent experience I had whilst meeting some new graduate engineers at workplace. Having understood any possible difference in our points of view, hence I would like to clarify thing in advance by introducing myself as a person who has engineering background and has been working as an engineer in an engineering consulting firm.

I'll start with a correlated reference to a "he", which shouldn't be misunderstood with any opinion in regards to male domination in engineering world. When an engineering school's graduate decides to pursue a career as a practising engineer, it means that he will have to be prepared to apply related knowledge he has learned at the university, in a real world scenario. It could be somewhat similar to finishing a practical assignment or an internship at the university, but this time, it would be for real ! Moreover, it comes with a real consequence too ! So, if this lad is lucky enough to get a job, the title of his first job will be Graduate Engineer and he will have to start from the very bottom of the pyramid.

In the first day of work, he will usually have many thoughts crossing his mind regarding the types of work in which he is likely to be engaged. Undeniably he may also feel nervous to even step his foot on the office floor. But I'm pretty sure, after all the thoughts and preparation a new starter usually has to make, that he will equip himself with a certain level of confidence to tackle his new challenge in his new career. But how confident can he be?

Some levels of "knowing a knowledge/experience" owned by professional staffs can typically be categorised into few levels as shown below, in the order of technical rank within a technical organisation (Please note that I used the word "staff" to replace "engineer", as this may apply to non-engineer as well):

1. 
   
2. A Graduate Staff thinks he knows a lot or all of them, but he actually doesn't know almost anything (practically!)
   
3. A Professional Staff thinks he knows a lot, but he actually knows a fair amount of knowledge or experience, having previously learned some of them;
   
4. An Experienced Professional Staff thinks he knows quite a significant amount of them, but he actually knows quite a lot of them;
   
5. A Technical Leader actually knows almost everything in his area of expertise, but he doesn't quite know that he actually knows all of them.
   

Are these really true? Maybe or May not be.

People, who are working in professional area, usually have spent years and years to study specialised knowledge at the universities or colleges. Nowadays, many higher learning institutions often overload students with many subjects and assignments but without adequate practical training, as if they were trying to fit the massive amount of knowledge into a single brain. Some students even had chance to learn advance version of some subjects in the final years or during the undertaking of thesis research. It is probably why people are buoyed with high confidence upon finishing the higher learning.

For instance, I met a new graduate engineer who has endlessly told me how challenging his thesis work was in designing a sophisticated airport pavement, and he also said he was quite confident about taking up the challenge of working as a practising pavement engineer (literally just to design a simple residential road pavement!!). A few months later, he complained about his struggle to get his works organised and the difficulty to make a sound judgement and risky decision.

What even more startling was that a few fresh graduates claimed that they so much deserved higher position in the companies that gave them their first jobs. Well, perhaps they have never heard about this unknown quotation "The only job that starts from the top level is digging a hole". So if you really want to climb to the top of the ladder, you should always start from the bottom up to the top! An exception can be made for those who inherit positions or businesses due to birth status.

Working in real world is not as simple as we once thought when we were celebrating the end of the tough university years. Some reasons that I can think to support this argument are as follow:

-          We deal with real problems (and often there is very little room for error and redoing);

-          We deal with real people with different expectations, i.e. stakeholders;

-          We are not being realistic;

-          We tend to underestimate things that look smaller;

-          Sometimes we cannot rely on other people to get our job done, etc

But hey, I don't think we do anything wrong by believing that we know many things prior to commence our first job. However, if we are successfully being accepted to work as a graduate staff (for example), we really should behave as graduate staff who is expected to seek guidance and learning from senior staffs. Unless you hate your first job, you should give it a start with a certain degree of humility and consider to even say this humbly "Please can you show me how to do this task"

A once famous American sportsman Yogi Berra once said in his comment whilst referring to a famous scientist "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is".