Here's how you can enhance your critical thinking skills in Electronic Engineering.

Unlike any other business or profession, electrical work requires 100% focus on what you are doing. It's one of the few professions where if you make a bad enough mistake you will catastrophically break your own heart, literally. So be ready to work and be safe. You must know the basics, inside and out. The more specialized the more complex your circuits will be but basics are always used everywhere. Troubleshooting REQUIRES that you figure out and understand what IS the problem even before working. Read at least an hour a day on your chosen specialty. Even when you don't want to. Whatever you do master it in every aspect, that one thing, the thing that makes you the most money. But stay careful and sharp. Family has only you.

Without the knowledge there is no way you're going to critically think. Theory and practical balance each other . In my view and to give a little background story of my own, during the covid 19 lockdown the practical aspects were limited to me and I had just graduated so I used that time to read broadly and kid you not it has helped me to critically think and speak from an angle of knowing when faced with an electrical problem.

Critical thinking is a must have for electrical engineering. A useful tool that is used in other fields, is the 5 whys. When encountering a problem define the problem but then ask why several times as you formulate a solution. It will become clear to you. For example, let's say a motor has stopped running and you find that the circuit breaker has tripped. You can reset the circuit breaker but that doesn't solve the problem. By asking why has the circuit breaker tripped it opens up a deeper investigation. It turns out that the relay stayed open, well why is that? You find that there was a sensor that wasn't working. Why wasn't the sensor working? You find that the sensor was covered during cleaning. All from asking Why.

When a project fails its useful to analyze why in great detail. Everyone looks into the failure and usually attempt to find blame. i.e. someone else to blame. But this doesn't solve the problem. During a postmortem attempt to understand first of all, where in the process the failure has come from. Was it the installation of a device, was it the device itself, was it the incorrect component, was it project manager, was it the electrical schematics (check the revision log). Sometimes you may find that the problem that created the failure is a new way of using the component. After all the microwave was invented after it failed to find German U-boats but instead melted a chocolate bar.

Simulation can be a real game changer for electrical engineers, and probably I don't need to explain this. By creating inside simulated environments circuits or more complex systems, bottlenecks, problems with the design and catastrophic failures can be more easily caught. I've seen good engineers make mistakes with their designs. And a lot of the time it is because of the pressure of a deadline. However, inside the simulation you are able to monitor and visualize what the circuit is doing. How it is interacting with other components of the system and determine whether or not something needs to be changed. It's easy to design a flaw into a system and harder to catch it when it is on paper instead of in an ecosystem.