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58 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2025 Feature Interview by Andy Shaughnessy ere are a lot of job openings for PCB design engineers, and not enough young people in the pipeline to fill these jobs. How are we going to attract this next generation of design engineers to this industry, and what's the best course of action for continuous training of these EEs? I asked Bill Hargin, founder and "director of everything" at Z-zero, to share his thoughts continuous training and what the future may hold for design engineers of the future. As a sig- nal integrity engineer and founder of his stackup soware company, Bill has a fairly circumspect view of the industry, and he's done his share of hiring. He's also slightly off-grid, which oen comes in handy in this evolving field. Finding and Training the Next Design Engineers Andy Shaughnessy: What advice regarding training and education would you give a young electrical engineer right out of college who wants to start a career as a PCB design engineer? Bill Hargin: I think most companies have required and optional training opportunities, so leaning into that is a good start. My first job out of college was at Boeing, and we had tons of training options. I was almost always taking some sort of aer-work course. Beyond that, I think everyone working in electronic hard- ware design should be working through books specific to hardware design. If it's important, someone has written a book about it.