The answer was, I think, you'll do fine, you're a good engineer. Personally, I do not know all that many people who do what they were trained for.
I know that what was tought in the early 70's w.r.t. EMI engineering, is not what is practised today. I know that what was common treatment for a miniscus (Cracked knee cartiliedge), is no longer practised today. Therefore, I question the value of spending university time on the "latest" specialist training. Implicit in every job filled by a University graduate is that it is incumbent on that graduate to spend whatever personal and company time is necessary, to keep up to date with new technology. Your off-time is not your own to do with as you would like, unless you want to become staledated. In my books, an electronic design engineer who does not know how to design for EMI, no longer is an electronic design engineer. He/she WAS a design engineer. On the other hand, I do not expect that design engineer to know the EMI requirements in every principality on earth, or how to measure to them (much less how to fill out the forms). My sequence of events is that: Marketing writes a commercial specification Product Integrity or Compliance Engineering, translates it into a design specification Product Design does an initial design to that spec, and depending on organization, costs it out for production, or has that done by the manufacturing people. The result is that marketing finds the product too expensive and starts the bickering about which of the requirements are going to be traded off. You cannot drop regulatory requirements, you can limit the market for the product by deciding that the product need not meet the requirements for Upper Slobovia. The Product Integrity (or Engineering Compliance, or International Approvals, or Compatibility Group) needs to be involved in that design process from day one, and stay with it till the certificates are in). It must be realized that this is not a design issue, but a marketing issue. You must know what your market is and what it wants and recognize that the objective is to make a profit on this product, not to make the best possible product for all possible markets. Some manufacturers choose to address the low-end market and make a pretty decent product (not a BMW) for that market and do a pretty good business. Others concentrate on building top of the line equipment only and do a decent business, just doing that. By the way, it is not uncommon that the marketing department changes the initial commercial specification, half way through the design process, simply because the market changed on them. C'est la vie. It is the job of the design and product integrity engineers to keep up with those changes and be familiar with all possible technologies and regulations to make the required changes as quick as possible. By the way, the job of the Product Integrity engineer is not just to know what the regulations currently are. That is his base line. He/she must know what changes are in the wings in his favorite markets, so that the product will meet the actual requirements when the product comes off the line, not the actual requirements when the product was designed. That requires a constant review of proposals being made in various national and international standards bodies. If you can't do that, the next best thing is to attend update seminars given by reputable organizations, not simply out to scare you. If you can't do that, hope that your marketing department has a huge profit margin, because you will be redesigning at the last moment. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, YOU MUST STAY IN THE INFORMATION STREAM. Unfortunately, I have seen a lot of VERY GOOD information on this channel, but also some lousy information. The peole who most need the information, are not in a position to distinguish between the two. No University course will help you. In one way or another, you will have to do the legwork yourself. Ciao, Vic
