I have some bad news. No matter how much you (or I) try to obtain mastery of Problem Solving methods, it is not enough. It has never been, is not now, and will never be enough just to be a ninja at any particular problem-solving method (including the methods I loudly endorse).
You also have to be proficient in your subject matter. That takes time, effort, focus, patience, and lots of practice.
Here are some examples: how confident would you be if your surgeon casually mentioned that he is an expert at disease diagnosis and disease progression, but that he had never actually operated on a living patient regarding whatever he is planning to remove or change in your body. Or if the handyman you just hired to work on your house picked up a hammer and said, “Oh, so this is what a hammer feels like. I always wondered how heavy they are.”
When you are interviewing for a position as an engineer, the interviewer and hiring manager will welcome the idea that you have studied and thought about what problems they solve for their customers. If you have great examples of how you have solved and documented projects in the past (including student projects) that will elevate you above those who paid attention only to subject matter in their classes—if, and only if you can match their subject matter knowledge and skills.
This is why the example Electrical Engineering interview questions elsewhere in this blog include some very basic Electrical Engineering questions. Some questions are designed to get you to reveal how you think about solving problems.
When I was a hiring manager, I always asked a few open-ended questions.
One of the examples I used came from an interview question I had received as a candidate. “Assume that you were asked to design an instrumentation package that would be attached to an elephant in the wild. What kind of questions will you ask the people proposing this project?”
I later changed the question to something similar: “Assume that someone told you that you were the best person to design a new house for that person. What questions would you ask the person wanting you to design their house?”
In both cases, my hope was that they would quickly or eventually arrive at questions like:
New graduates will tend to focus most on the Results item. They will ask a lot of question about the technical requirements. But even interviewees with minimal real-world experience will eventually get to the other constraints—although they might need some hints to get there.
Exploring some kind of imaginary project is a fun way to get candidates to consider and explain how they would deal with the constraints of People, Time, Money, and Results. Some candidates already have formal training in thinking this way. Some candidates have the light bulb go on while they are explaining it to the interviewer. Some candidates never quite get there.
But as I said at the beginning, it will not be enough, if you only know a good problem solving method. You will need to back up your problem-solving methods with the skills and knowledge expected of anybody doing that work.