The very first project I worked on had a 3,000 amp, 480 V service. A few months prior, I had been in an electronics lab dealing with 3 milliamps and 5 volts. Six orders of magnitude is something to behold.
I got a BSEE in 1979, and went into controls systems engineering. Multidiscipline field that is NOT taught in college (in spite of claims of curriculum). I am not only working with control systems wiring and software, but also hydraulics, chemical process, heat transfer, power, as well as mechanical areas. The engineering schools still do not teach how to tie everything together.
Which leads into another thing I notice with new grads, and also ties into the HR mentality. Some of these new grads, even with a few years experience, see something new and lock up. "I never had a course on that". Engineers who use this excuse I think missed the boat while they were in school. What is covered is the basics, and if the engineer was really paying attention he would go to the basics, read the manual, ask some good educated questions, and figure it out. No, they need to be spoon fed. Some of this I suspect is the view by some that engineering is just a stepping stone to management, just do some resume polishing, get into a management position, and forget everything technical after that. I have seen a lot of upper management and executive types follow that track. Of course I say this, and I am a business partner in a new industrial automation company - yet I still have to go out and troubleshoot systems.