What do you do if you need to assess the technical skills of product engineers?

After working with multiple engineers in multiple disciplines across the globe I have observed differences in engineering skill sets. As a mechanical engineer by degree I can confidently say that the education system does not provide the fundamentals required to design robust cost effective solutions. You must understand materials and heat treatment and its relation to durability and cost. In addition you must know the tools to use for efficient and future proof design. One example is an individual's use of Shigley's and the Machinery's Handbook.

There is a difference in having degree with top grades and actually able to master in skill-sets. Having a good degree can act as a gateway for job market but fundamental understanding the technical skill with practical experience is much more important. At times grads degrees are outdated and no longer making industry ready. Learning skills outside university subjects may turn useful. Secondly keeping tap on vertical of your industry, the trends, tech innovations, companies might be very useful and at times vital for growth.

For a product minded engineer, most traditional coding tests or interview questions really fail to capture the product aspects of the job. Sure, you need to be able to write code, but make sure you are also evaluating someones ability to write clearly, draw a basic flow of a feature, or think about considerations like customer impact, rollout and migration plans, and how design and UX needs to be incorporated. The best tests for this are usually more free-form and ask candidates to write up a spec or product pitch for a feature, including some rough sketches and maybe some interesting code snippets for the core pieces or data model.

I have seen the use of a design challenge for the first technical interview for a position. This practice is very vague and allows the candidate to expose many things not visible on a resume or too complex for an interview question. As such the hiring team gets to see the candidates type of thinking, problem solving, and breadth of engineering discipline knowledge. The problem must have clear expectations and boundaries to be effective.

Discussing projects can be very useful during interviews. During interviews one can discuss these factors : 1) Project overviews 2) About the project and your contribution of it 3) Business impact of the project 4) Challenges faced during project and how it was overcome 5) Stakeholder management 6) Budget distribution 7) Timeline and estimations 8) Success of project 9) Learning from project

Experiencing lifelong learning is highly important in all careers, but especially for product engineers. Developing engineering skills should be based on knowledge, know-how, and the attitude to put it into practice. Therefore, understanding what the engineer knows, what he can do, and what he has been able to put into practice is essential to understand his real skills.

I have been on the interview team where our candidate had multiple undergraduate, masters, and doctorates in engineering. On the resume it would appear as they are over qualified but they may have missed out on the most important part of engineering... Experience. That being said, doing an internship while going for your degree is absolutely essential for success. I personally dabble in many disciplines outside of work in my hobbies. Hobbies are a great way for one to learn the basics of other disciplines. Examples are rocketry with DIY motors (heat transfer, chemistry, materials) and application of open source code requiring PCB design and fabrication.

Engineering itself means to 'Engineer' stuff around, resulting innovation. With innovation and technological advancements its obvious that the way we perform our day-to-day tasks will change. And any company to keep itself forward invests lot in R&D. As an engineer its very important to keep up with tech to be competition ready and market fit. Learnings with practical experiences adds a lot more value on resume then just degrees. Doing courses of new techs and building self projects on it will give edge over.