This is Part 5 of our series on Upskilling in Engineering.
In the previous article, we looked at the difference between teacher-centered and student-centered learning, and how to choose between them depending on the situation. Before that, we examined the mechanics of good teaching: scaffolding, intersubjectivity, and contingency. Now it is time to look at what happens when those structures are absent.
The Cost of Poor Scaffolding: Failures That Could Be Prevented
The consequences of poor scaffolding are not always dramatic. Sometimes they look like a project quietly going off the rails. Sometimes they look like an employee who stops growing, loses motivation, or eventually decides to move on. Many times, the common thread is the right support was not in place at the right time, and the cost was higher than it needed to be.
Support does not look the same at every stage of someone's career. Discussing what each stage may require, and what is at risk when that support is missing, is the first step toward preventing these outcomes.
The Recent Graduate
The need for scaffolding is perhaps more obvious with newer employees. They are learning the tools of the trade from the ground up, and that can be a significant challenge going into the working world.
In Industrial Automation, many engineers remember the moment they learned that you download to a PLC and upload from it, the reverse of nearly every convention the internet has ingrained in us. Small idiosyncrasies like that are generally learned on the job. But without guard rails, a newer engineer can make mistakes in contexts that are less forgiving. Downloading to a development PLC and wiping the code is recoverable. Doing the same thing in a production environment can mean downtime, damaged equipment, or worse.
The same dynamic plays out on the interpersonal side. A newer engineer sitting in on a customer meeting for the first time, without any preparation or context, is likely to say something inaccurate or out of place. That too can have consequences, for the relationship with the customer and for the engineer's confidence going forward.
Without proper scaffolding, mistakes stop being learning opportunities and start becoming discouraging. A recent graduate who repeatedly struggles without direction is not just at risk of making costly errors. They are at risk of losing the motivation to keep growing at all. Pointing them toward appropriate learning resources, walking them through key conventions before they encounter them in the field, and bringing them into customer interactions with some preparation beforehand, are not just extras. They are what keep early-career development on track.
The Growing Employee
An employee a few years into their career presents a more complex challenge. They have enough experience that it is reasonable and expected to give them more ownership. Perhaps their first project as a technical lead, or a larger, more independent piece of a project. The goal at this stage is deliberate stretch. The expectation is that they will struggle some, and that the struggle itself is what produces growth.
That makes calibrating support difficult. Too much involvement and the employee never stretches to figure anything out. Too little and the situation can deteriorate in ways that are difficult to recover from.
Consider someone handed their first technical lead role. Where do they start? Even if the company has a documented process, if no one has ever walked through it with them or shown what good execution looks like, the documentation alone may not be enough. Gathering requirements, managing customer communication, planning and conducting the work, and keeping a team aligned are all skills that benefit from having seen them done well first.
And projects rarely go exactly as planned. What happens when the customer is unusually difficult to work with? When the scope shifts and falls outside the engineer's technical comfort zone? When they are not sure whether they have enough information to move forward? These are the moments when the absence of scaffolding is felt most acutely, not just by the engineer, but by the project itself.
Support at this stage does not mean holding someone's hand through every decision. It means someone is checking in regularly enough to know when the project needs a course correction. The engineer has a person they can bring questions to, even small ones. The safety net exists, even if it is rarely needed. Without it, the risk is not just that the employee feels unsupported. It could be that the project suffers, the customer relationship takes a hit, or the employee concludes that the cost of taking on more responsibility is not worth it.
The Experienced Employee
The experienced employee requires the least direct support, but that does not mean they require none. And the consequences of getting it wrong at this stage can be just as significant, even if they are slower to surface.
An experienced engineer who consistently has learning opportunities dismissed or new challenges denied will eventually stop asking. Skills that are not stretched begin to stagnate. And an engineer who feels that their technical judgment is regularly second-guessed or overruled will start to feel that they lack the authority to do their job well. That kind of erosion can be quiet until it is not.
Support for experienced employees is less about directing their development and more about enabling them to do their best work. It looks like organizational backing when they are making difficult technical decisions, being trusted to lead a team without too much interference, and having their requests for new challenges or learning opportunities taken seriously. The scaffolding is less visible at this stage, but the need for it does not disappear.
What’s Next in the Series
In the final article, we will shift from theoretical to practice. We will look at some concrete ideas for how to build intentional upskilling into the way a team operates, with the understanding that these are starting points rather than fixed rules, and that the right framework will depend on the people and the environment involved.
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