I get the bad feeling that so many are unprepared for productive work.
I believe the colleges are failing in this regard. In my interview process one of the things I ask is for them to find a flaw in an engineering drawing. The drawing in question has several. Some easy, some difficult.
I don’t expect them to find all the issues. I’m looking for one thing. Will they admit they don’t know everything and say so. I do tell them the number to look for. Most can find 1 or 2.
The point on the colleges I draw from this is they are taught how to use fancy CAD programs, but none of the fundamentals of drafting or geometric dimensioning & tolerancing. Without the fundamentals there is no need for the advanced fancy programs because they will still only get crap.