Transition to the Workplace

This article submitted by Jason Welle on 8/12/02.

Topic:

Thoughts:

I believe that I have identified a key phenomenon that can shed light on the technological drive on society and the sense of responsibility of those who participate in it. There are three periods that a professional in the technical world goes through: 1) the education and mores instilled by their relatives and family associates, 2) the brand of instruction they receive through higher education, and 3) the transition from higher education to the workplace. I stated in my “The Engineer’s Instruction” posting that many take up a particular major out of interest or the prodding of family and associates. Often there is some stake a parent or opportunities presented by contacts in industry. The college experience is its own animal and its subject matter can be debated endlessly. But basically, at least from an engineering perspective, I saw students being endlessly drilled and mustered to be the “leaders of the future.”

Something happens when a student graduates and receives their first job, or series of jobs. I believe it may be one of the root causes of the incessant drive for a technology-saturated world and an unquestioning use of technological tools to further business and government agendas. To start off, a good percentage of what is learned in school does not reach the workplace. Unless the individual goes on to graduate school or takes part in research, those books and the notebooks of problems take a seat on a shelf where they become dusty and unused. Most of what is learned is tossed away and whether particular subjects will be seen again is up to chance. The workplace isn’t about the purity of the sciences and methods we learned; it is about business or the structure of some public works body and how we are going to have to adapt to it. Most of the first few years is all about learning how business works and keeping up in order to make it and advance. The new professional is bombarded by techniques, standards, and protocols that they must follow or they risk being ousted from their position for incompetence. All these things are company or agency-centric and have nothing to do with what they learned in school.

As time goes on, responsibilities mount and time becomes crucial. Your average engineer, marketing strategist, or manager isn’t concerned with a “god of technology and science.” How much work one has and how little time they have to do it in is on their minds. Saving their company money is on their minds. Using new technologies to combat their workloads is on their minds. And it cannot be forgotten that there is a family and interests back home, which need their share of attention too. In this period of learning the career world, the chance for a socially responsible professional is eliminated. There is hardly any room for a “god of technology and science” such as Technopoly; they accept its precepts as a given just like the rest of the populace. Technopoly, as Postman describes it, is a backdrop to the current world. It “already happened.” Nurtured for 300 years, it has spawned something else that may be more dangerous. It is a trend towards something more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which Postman does rightly point out in his writings. However, it gets stranger than that.

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