Your training will be a slide deck. If you’re lucky, it is recent. If you’re very lucky, someone actually walks through it with you. More often it is emailed, half out of date, and treated as proof that the company “did onboarding.”
After that, you’re live.
Mechanical engineering quietly assumes that competence appears through exposure. Not mentoring. Not instruction. Exposure. You inherit legacy drawings, old CAD habits, vendor quirks, undocumented PLC behavior, and a system that only works because the last person learned its moods the hard way. Then you are told to move quickly and not make mistakes.
When you do make mistakes, the response is rarely instructional. It is reactive. A raised voice. A “we already went over this.” A look that says you should have known. This is not really cruelty. It is the structure of the work. Senior engineers are rewarded for throughput and firefighting, not for building replacements. Teaching slows them down, so it does not happen. You are there to keep inherited systems running, not to understand them deeply or improve them thoughtfully. See Reason #14.
High turnover finishes what the incentives started. When people leave every two or three years, no one believes training will ever pay back. New hires are dropped into the deep end and told to swim. The pipeline quietly assumes apprenticeship, but the labor market is run on churn. That mismatch is not accidental. It is baked in. See Reason #25. Oversupply makes it tolerable for employers and brutal for individuals. See Reason #1 and Reason #34.
Temp-to-perm and extended “trial” employment lock it in place. Why invest in training someone who might not be converted, or who can be cut the moment demand softens? Long auditions reward quiet survival, not learning. Ask too many questions and you look risky. Make it through and the lesson is clear: you trained yourself. See Reason #45.
The breadth people praise only sharpens the edge. Mechanical roles rely on constant self-teaching across disciplines, but the job title pretends this is normal rather than extractive. You become productive by absorbing institutional debt no one bothered to document, and then you are congratulated for being “versatile.” See Reason #8.
There are exceptions. Regulated aerospace groups. Certain energy niches. A few long-tenure firms with cultural memory. Even there, training usually stops once you’re “useful.” It is front-loaded, not sustained. The moment you can carry load, the expectation shifts to silent competence.
For most of the field, the rule is simple: if you need training, you’re already behind.
The system survives because enough people accept this as normal.
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