#118 - The half-life of a good Engineer!

13 Aug 26

Trial Brief

Knowledge has a half-life. Left untouched, it doesn't sit quietly on a shelf waiting for you to need it again. It decays, and it decays exponentially! Most Engineers know this in theory but far fewer act on it in practice. The result is a workforce, and often a leadership team, that is quietly running on knowledge that was current several years ago and has not been refreshed since.

Trial Execution

I learned this lesson the hard way and very early on. During my Engineering apprenticeship, the Navy's modular training model in the mid-1980s ran on a simple rhythm. A new subject started every Monday, and an exam closed it out every Friday morning, just before we all went home for weekend leave. The incentive structure that created was obvious in hindsight. Revision became cramming. The goal wasn't mastery, it was clearing the Friday hurdle so the weekend could start. Monday would bring a fresh subject, often with no connection to the one before it, so there was never a reason to reinforce what you'd just 'passed'. I fostered a fire-and-forget mentality toward the material without even noticing I was doing it.

The bill for that became due quickly. Once I joined the trained strength and went to sea, the Navy expected a return on its training investment, and it wanted that return immediately. My first submarine draft was a transit to the polar ice cap, to surface at the North Pole. There was no runway to relearn anything gently. Every fire-and-forget moment from the training pipeline came home to roost at once, and I had to learn at a pace I hadn't been conditioned for.

Trial Findings

It would be easy to file that story under 'newly qualified Engineer problem' and move on. It isn't though because skill fade does not respect seniority. I have sat across from senior leaders whose grasp of their own technical domain was still, in effect, frozen around 2015; current at the time they last had to actively use it, and steadily eroding ever since, without a single dramatic moment to mark the decline.

That's what makes skill fade dangerous: it's silent. A skill you use daily doesn't fade. The feedback loop keeps it sharp without you trying. A skill you last exercised properly years ago fades exponentially and invisibly, and nobody sends you a notification when it crosses the threshold from 'a bit rusty' into 'no longer reliable'. You usually find out at the worst possible moment, under the worst possible pressure, exactly as I did heading north under the ice.

The deeper issue is structural, not personal. Formal learning has a defined end point; a course, a qualifications package or a promotion board. Continuation training does not. Once you're through the formal pipeline, the responsibility for keeping current transfers entirely to you, and there's rarely an institutional prompt reminding you to pick it up. Stephen Covey's image of sharpening the saw captures it well. The saw doesn't stay sharp on its own, and the cutting doesn't get easier if you skip the sharpening to save time. It gets slower, and eventually it stops cutting altogether. Skipping the sharpening to protect the schedule is exactly the fire-and-forget mentality I learned, without meaning to, on those Friday exams.

The Common Thread

Fire-and-forget learning optimises for the wrong thing. It optimises for clearing the immediate hurdle like the exam, the course sign-off or the badge rather than for the knowledge still being usable for when it's actually needed. It is often needed much later and under much less forgiving conditions than a Friday morning classroom. Left unchecked, that gap between 'once qualified' and 'currently capable' widens every year, exponentially, and quietly, whether you're three months into the job or thirty years in.

Trial Sign-off

One practical action

Pick one technical or leadership area you haven't actively exercised in the last twelve months. Choose something you would have called a strength once, but haven't had to prove lately. Find one concrete way to refresh it this week: read a paper, have a conversation with someone still close to it, solve a real problem you deliberately go and get involved in. Don't let it stay theoretical.

One question for reflection

Where in your current role are you relying on knowledge you haven't actively tested or updated in years? What would it cost you if that gap surfaced under pressure, rather than on your own terms?

Have a great week!

Steve