What It Takes to Be an Adaptable Engineer

The AI boom has disrupted the way engineers work, introducing new tools to learn, raising expectations for what teams can achieve in a workday, and making it harder to get hired in the first place. This makes it difficult to advise students on which specific coding languages or technical skills they should learn. So amidst the uncertainty, advice for young professionals often turns to a common refrain: Be adaptable. But what does adaptability look like in practice? Engineers often operate on the cutting edge of technology, so dealing with change is a normal part of the job, says Samantha Brunhaver , an associate professor of engineering at Arizona State University, in Tempe. Yet university curricula and training in the workplace often don’t prepare students for this. “We tell engineers that they need to be adaptable when they graduate, but we don’t actually explain what that means, demonstrate what that looks…