Why Engineering Graduates Work at Target

I see engineering graduates working at Target despite spending four years and tens of thousands of dollars on their degrees.

What's really happening goes beyond "they couldn't find a job."

They weren't set up with the right skills to succeed in the job market. Universities gave them enough skills to succeed academically, but not industrially. That's the fundamental problem with these degrees.

The system forces students to get three different educations simultaneously: university, internships, AND online courses just to maybe get hired. We've normalized this educational chaos instead of fixing the broken foundation.

The Triple Education Trap

Students now need internships to compensate for university shortcomings. Why hunt for internships if you're already in a four-year program? The experience should be automatic.

Then they need online courses on top of everything else. But only 8-15% of people finish online courses because they're overwhelmed, overworked, and looking for money now, not two years from now.

The numbers confirm this disaster. Over 41% of recent college graduates are underemployed, with 45% still lacking college-level jobs a decade later.

Even computer science, ranked the #1 college major, has a 6.1% unemployment rate. We're selling students a dream that doesn't match reality.

The 30-Hour Transformation

I proved the system is obsolete through intensive, personality-tailored training. Take Kaitlyn, one of my university students who desperately wanted to work in Silicon Valley to be with family.

She had no hope of getting hired as a PCB designer at Astranis. The role required high-speed board design skills that typically take 2-3 years of industry experience.

I took her through 36 hours of intensive training in electromagnetic field theory, signal integrity, and PCB design in Altium. She went from unemployable to hired at $120,000 at age 22.

That transformation would traditionally take years. I compressed it into weeks.

This isn't luck. I've reduced the typical 3+ year PCB design learning curve to 60-90 hours. People pay me $5,000 for this program and get hired at top companies within four months.

The Scale of Waste

The skills gap costs the U.S. chemical process industries alone $320 million per year. About one-third of new engineering roles remain unfilled annually.

We're destroying human potential on a massive scale. Students spend years accumulating "should know" knowledge they forget anyway, then graduate feeling lacking and resentful toward themselves.

Engineers have high standards because they know what they're capable of. When the system fails them, they either work jobs that don't make them feel like engineers or abandon engineering entirely.

Some work at Target. Others pursue PhDs because they realize they're not qualified for real jobs. It's a huge waste of four years for a piece of paper that still isn't enough.

Mission-Based Learning

The solution involves experience-based learning where students learn through missions and real-world scenarios. Take them through situations that require using Ohm's law principles to restore a radio for communication.

Something engaging and real. Students need to FEEL and EXPERIENCE their skills.

When learning is internally developed through experience, it shapes that person. Current lectures cover too much information too fast. Students forget most of it anyway.

Skills pay the bills, not knowledge. We need skills-focused curriculums that prepare students for specific industry roles rather than broad theoretical knowledge they'll never use.

The Inevitable Transformation

What's stopping this approach from replacing traditional engineering education? Nothing, as far as I'm aware.

It's like introducing the iPhone to the cell phone industry before smartphones existed. Universities that refuse to adapt will get fewer students or get compared to institutions delivering real results.

Students could live multiple careers, gain skills rapidly, and explore different industries before dealing with burnout. People would be more fulfilled, have increased income, and actually become the engineers they dreamed of being instead of shells of their imaginations.

Society would accelerate by orders of magnitude within a generation.

We're surviving despite our education systems, not because of them. The collapse of traditional engineering education stops wasting people's time and helps them fulfill their true potential.

That's exactly why this transformation is the best thing that could happen to future engineers.