No, you can't pick it up "very, very quickly." That is a dismissive and indirect way to assert that engineering is somehow easier or requires less intellectual rigor than "higher" disciplines like CS or math.
I tried to make it very clear that you can pick up the knowledge-based part - or that part that you can learn at school or using books, which is also the part that is tested in exams - quickly. In that respect it is indeed easier.
What may not be that easy is the experience to make good decisions. But there is no clear path for that, except being an engineer for a sufficiently long time. This piece was targeted at students and you can't just tell them: "Keep working somewhere else for 10 years".
