Engineers' Data Book

Clifford Matthews

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781119969051
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

ENGINEERS' DATA BOOK

A completely revised and expanded fourth edition of this best-selling pocket guide. Engineers' Data Book provides a concise and useful source of up-to-date essential information for the student or practising engineer.

• Updated, expanded edition
• Easy to use
• Handy reference guide
• Core technical data

Clifford Matthews is an experienced engineer with worldwide knowledge of mechanical engineering.

Section 1

Engineering Careers

1.1 Introduction: What is an Engineer?

You can hear, and read, long opinionated, but largely inconclusive, arguments as to what the title ‘engineer’ actually means. For every view that the title should be limited to those with a certain level of qualifications, or have attained a prescribed level of Institution membership, there is a contrary view that says it should relate equally to those who can prove a level of practical or craft skill, or demonstrate so many years of vocational experience.

Unlike some countries, where the designation is better defined, the situation in the UK remains liberal and self-regulated. In many industries the titles ‘engineer’ and ‘technician’ are used freely and interchangeably, without causing too much chaos. Older, more traditional industries often have more a definitive intenal understanding of what the titles mean to them. This owes as much, or more, to their own hierarchical structure and heritage, however, as to any technical interpretation they really ascribe to the terms. This older view of the world, whether you are called ‘technician’ or ‘engineer’, paints to them a picture of whether or not you sit in an office or get your hands dirty, what you wear, and how much you get paid.

Looking back in time to the start of it all, it becomes clear that job titles and delineations are much more artificial than they appear. The earliest engineers conceived the ideas, designed their innovative steam engines, bridges and ships, raised the funds, and did many of the jobs themselves. This was born of necessity, because there were no ready-trained technicians waiting to take on the engineers' concepts and turn them into reality. Once under way, however, industry matured quite quickly and separate job roles soon started to crystallize out, driven by people's preference to concentrate on things that they naturally did best.

Over the last 100 years or so, with increased maturity of the industrial society, the division of labour has continued, each engineering specialism soon fragmenting into several subspecialisms of its own, and so on. This is why the argument as to what exactly delineates an engineer from a technician has no real answer, and probably never will have. It is simply too difficult to draw a line in the sand, within such a large and varied continuum of skills, on which everyone will agree.

Assuming that you have no wish to spend the next forty or so years worrying about a question to which you know there is no answer, here is another way to look at it. Think of engineers and technicians as all being part of the wide spectrum of engineering. A spectrum has no gaps between its colours, each one leads seamlessly on to the next. Now think what it would look like viewed in black and white rather than colour – they are now all the same colour (grey) differentiated from each other only by the depth of their shade of grey.

What if the shades of grey represented technical difficulty? The light grey shades would represent job roles that are easier to learn, with the dark ones being progressively more difficult. Difficulty might also be associated not only with the technical depth of the subject or role but also with the time it would take to learn to do it well. At no point in this continuum from white (easy) to black (difficult) could we draw a definitive line dividing ‘light’ from ‘dark’, all we can say is that the spectrum consists of varying degrees of lightness and darkness and that every shade forms part of the complete picture. So this is our conclusion:

• Generic job titles such as ‘engineer’ and ‘technician’ cannot, realistically, be accurately defined – they are simply parts of the continuous spectrum of job roles in the engineering industry. However . . .
• One way to view the difference in roles is to consider how difficult each one is, and how long it would take to master it (properly!).

1.2 A Rough Guide to Industry Breakdown

There are many hundreds of different industry types, roles, job descriptions and specialisms in the world of mechanical engineering, all of which are spread over a multitude of different industry sectors. There are various systems that attempt to categorize these into standard industry classifications (SICs) using code numbers or letters, but they are complicated and do not always fit well with each other.

Simplistically, you can think of the engineering industry, and the job roles within it, as a matrix. To keep this matrix to any sort of manageable size means that it needs to be generalized – providing an overall picture rather than a detailed or comprehensive analysis.

Figure 1.1 shows the matrix. The more basic industries lie near the bottom, rising to the increasingly complex and technologically advanced ones towards the top. Although pure science elements exist at all these levels they become more prevalent (and are used in greater detail) in those industries near the top of the matrix. There is no implication of value or worth to industry in the position of any entry in the vertical scale, it is just a crude grading based on the overall complexity and resultant difficulty of the subject. The horizontal axis of the matrix is different. This shows the basic allocation of job roles which is equally applicable to all the industry sectors in the vertical scale. There may be a few differences, but the basic breakdown is much the same for all. The horizontal axis is based on a chronological (time) scale, running left to right. Unlike the vertical axis, the differences in complexity and difficulty are less well spread across the horizontal axis. Product conception and design fit naturally together as a discrete skill-set, but the others are fairly well separated out, representing discrete and identifiable job roles.

Figure 1.1

The left-hand end – conception and design – suits those people with high levels of innovation and conceptual skills. They can spot an idea, visualizing its final function and form, but lack a full set of skills suited to turning it into hard engineering reality. At the right-hand end, plant operators and technicians have the business and practical skills to operate a plant or a range of products on a commercial basis, but lack the skills to conceive, design and build a plant or product range from scratch. They need others to provide those skills.

You can use this rough matrix to plot your current position in the industrial landscape, or to plan where you might like to be in the future. It is neither complete nor exhaustive (there would need to be 40+ vertical categories to accomplish that), but as a broad career route map it is not a bad place to start.

1.3 Training and Professional Development

Whatever you do, don't confuse these two. It is best to think of training as your initial academic qualification: craft training or whatever – an activity whose prime purpose is to get you into your first engineering job. It also provides essential (and useful) technical background to get you onto the doorstep of your subject, but does not yet provide you with any of the full skill sets you need to move forward. This training is a benchmark, slotted into the system to differentiate between those who have it and those who do not.

Professional development is the next step. This is any training activity that has a specific job-related objective or purpose. It is often mistakenly seen as comprising mid-career courses in generalized disciplines such as marketing, finance, QA, project management skills and similar. Such-temptingly-named courses are really not what it is about. Whilst they may look and sound good, they lack cutting edge in differentiating those people with real ability in the core skills of the industry from those who do not. They are too general, too short, and woefully lacking in core skills, technical content and bite.

Productive professional development must be centred on the core skills of your particular industry. To possess the quality of being able to differentiate between its participants, productive professional development has to be structured to have a pass or fail criteria, with a pass mark high enough (and overall pass rate low enough) to buy it credibility and give it some teeth.

The best time to start productive professional development is as soon as possible after your initial training is complete. For best effect try to run it in parallel with a role that gains you practical hands-on experience of the discipline in which you are employed. This will force the productive and professional elements to complement each other, multiplying the effect of them both. Coupled with sound initial training and a bit of hands-on experience, the way in which you choose to pursue professional development activities in the early career years seems to be one of the clear factors in determining those who progress quickly up the technical jobs hierarchy and those who do not.

1.4 Degrees of (Engineering) Excellence

You have probably decided that getting a degree is a good idea – or why would you be reading this book? The reason why any high-level qualification is required is always a good talking point. Opinions differ about why it is necessary, and what is the point of it all.

The time-honoured explanation you will be given is that it is all about training your mind. Engagement in the apparently endless carousel of mathematical examples, laboratory reports, descriptions and discussions will train your grey cells to address similar, even unrelated, problems in your future career – and all will be well.

This is interesting but, of course, untrue. Your mind is now as trained as it will ever be. It is at the pinnacle of its absorptive, innovative and recuperative powers – loaded, primed and ready to go. You are sitting at the end of 400,000 to 500,000 years of human development, a continuum of innovation, forward thinking and trial-and-error that turned the world from stone age caves and forests to what you see today. Most of the steps and discoveries were made by people under the age of 25, without any qualifications at all – which is a very recent development.

If we set the above aside as an illusion disproven by history, we find that the need for an engineering degree today is based on four main criteria. Consider them of equal weight: complementary criteria that naturally exist as part of a set, and each of which has little resonance or effectiveness without the assistance of the others.

1.4.1 A Degree is a Benchmark

As a benchmark for industry, degrees work reasonably well without being spectacular. Industries seem to like benchmarks, as it gives them something to aim for, or against which they can measure their success. Engineering companies use them as part of their recruitment policy, giving them some idea of whom to invite to interviews.

One of the strange properties of benchmarks is that they cannot be usefully produced by the part of organization that sees the benefit in using them. The profit-making parts of any engineering business (consisting of those people and groups that actually know how things work) are far too busy trying to extract profit from the market – whilst supporting the rest of the organization and its hangers-on – to get involved in recruitment policy, skill-sets or this week's current incarnation of the education system. The result is that recruitment policy and practices are administered by those on the edge of an organization rather than at its profit-making core. This fosters the practice of grabbing at plausible-sounding requirements that can be put in recruitment adverts, and slid into the candidate assessment procedure.

The actual detailed content of degree courses can (and do) remain a bit of mystery to many recruiters. The content of most benchmark qualifications are set in academia rather than by the ‘customer’ organizations because, as we know, they are simply too busy. Some comfort is offered by various third-party accreditation...