An Engineering Career: Only A Young Person's Game? By Robert N. Charette

When reading “An Engineering Career: Only a Young Person’s Game?” by Robert N. Charette, we are able to grasp the meaning behind the half-life engineering knowledge and how it affects the general engineer in the workplace. Charette also provides other articles that will give tips on how to use lifelong learning to counter the effect of becoming obsolete in your knowledge.

Charette starts off by explaining how any engineer or computer professional is in the process of becoming obsolete, or out of date. Fritz Machlup is the owner behind the expression “half-life of knowledge” and he describes it as the time it takes for half of a person’s knowledge to become superseded. The half-life of knowledge has been steadily decreasing; 35 years in 1920 to 10 years in 1960, in 2008 the half-life of knowledge was said to be less than 5 years. I looked up another article by Kubel, Ed, Jr called “Engineering

In this paper, he was able to calculate what a person would need to do in order to refrain from being obsolete. Charette wrote, “ Jones postulated that a typical undergraduate engineer invested some 40 hours a week of study over 120 weeks in his or her degree…Jones said about 2400 hours of undergraduate knowledge has probably been superseded…an engineer would need to spend 5 hours each [week] gaining new technology, mathematics and scientific knowledge…to remain current.” (Charette). This is where lifelong learning would come into place. Keeping your mind sharp and keeping up with the technology “upskilling” as it is known to be called is a way of making sure that you won’t be passed up for somebody younger than you in the workplace. Engineering is not the only profession that is concerned with becoming obsolete; doctors, psychologist, and even philosophers have this fear of becoming dated within their profession as