The professional community

I heard another interesting story on NPR this morning about some new ideas of testing for cancer. While the story itself was good and hopeful (that we may catch another form of cancer in its early stages) it made me think of what we expect of our local doctors. After hearing this story, how many people will go to their family doctor and ask about these new procedures? They should, of course, because it is a good idea to take charge of your own health. But how many local doctors will know about the new ideas? Now I'm being a bit careless here thinking that listeners to public radio may know something before most doctors. It has probably been in the literature for a while. But the question is - Does my family doctor keep up with new ideas and procedures? Does he go to conferences? Does he participate in the medical community? Doctors can't be expected to do research on their own or test new procedures. They rely on other doctors and groups of doctors and scientists to do that and spread the word. That's where medical journals and conferences come in. Do doctors have a continuing education program where they go back to school to learn about new ways of doing things? I hope they do.

In engineering, I don't think it is as structured as it is in the fields of medicine and law. There are lots of opportunities for continuing education but you have to go looking. And they are not managed, rated or structured as well. But there are plenty of ways to keep up to date. There are:

* On-line communities (newsgroups and web sites) - One of the best I've found is the community that grew up around the Borland programming tools that have since become the CodeGear programing tools. Members of that community go to amazing lengths to help fellow programmers learn new ways of doing things. I've tried many other communities and you are either ignored or ridiculed.

* Conferences - The best conference I have ever attended is the yearly Embedded Systems Conference. There is one on the West Coast (in San Jose, CA, which I have not attended) and one on the East Coast(in Boston, MA, which is the one I have attended). It's is always well attended which is bad in a way because the class sizes are usually pretty large. But it also means there are lots of people with lots of different ideas to talk with. It has opened my eyes to a lot of new things. This is an especially good conference in that it mixes hardware and software classes.

* Magazines and books - Here it is hard to pick one or a few. I will have a post at a later date to just list my favorite books and magazines. While the number of magazines and books has diminished over the years, I find that the quality has remained high.

* Continuing learning - I think this is the weak link. While there are lots of available classes presented by universities and companies, the quality varies a lot and there is no association to rate them or oversee the quality. Here you have a choice of taking a semester long course at a college (or university) or a short course that lasts a few days to a week. I've taken good ones and bad ones but you never knew what you were going to get until you were in it. This is a real crap shoot.

I think one of the things that distinguishes a professional job from other jobs is the commitment of the professional to keep up with what is new and to keep improving their methods and their knowledge. If my boss asks me to do something, I don't want to be doing it the way I would have done it five years ago.