Learning Engineering Practice

James Trevelyan

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000289336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Ingénierie

This book explains engineering practice, what engineers actually do in their work. The first part explains how to find paid engineering work and prepare for an engineering career. The second part explains the fundamentals of engineering practice, including how to gain access to technical knowledge, how to gain the willing collaboration of other people to make things happen, and how to work safely in hazardous environments. Other chapters explain engineering aspects of project management missed in most courses, how to create commercial value from engineering work and estimate costs, and how to navigate cultural complexities successfully. Later chapters provide guidance on sustainability, time management and avoiding the most common frustrations encountered by engineers at work. This book has been written for engineering students, graduates and novice engineers. Supervisors, mentors and human resources professionals will also find the book helpful to guide early-career engineers and assess their progress. Engineering schools will find the book helpful to help students prepare for professional internships and also for creating authentic practice and assessment exercises.

Part 1

Preparation for an engineering career

Engineering is not what you might expect

Engineering students eagerly look forward to highly technical design and analysis work requiring elaborate software tools and solving technically challenging problems.

However, many graduates have a frustrating time trying to find paid employment and send out countless job applications, often without a response or acknowledgement. Even finding unpaid internships can be challenging.

When they eventually start working, graduates often find themselves assigned to seemingly simple and mundane tasks. Little can be achieved without the collaboration and coordination of other people who may seem preoccupied and disinterested. The advanced analysis capabilities acquired in their education may seem almost irrelevant.

Students today are silently conditioned to think that independent, intellectual, written work is the key to success because exams test that ability.

Engineering, instead, demands collaboration with other people from a wide range of backgrounds, from finance and trades to marketing and sales. Success in engineering depends on working with technical, business, and social factors that are all intertwined with each other.

Recent research has helped to clarify the principles upon which a successful engineering practice depends. Collaboration requires much more than conventional teamwork, as technological expertise demands specialised techniques, many of which are explained in this book. It takes time and effort to learn and practice these new skills.

This book provides a curriculum based on this research to guide workplace learning for the first 3 years of an engineering career, enabling novices to practice independently. The book also explains how to acquire critical knowledge that today is mastered by just a few engineers.

Is there a particular personality or set of abilities that is perfectly aligned with engineering? No! The ideas in this book demonstrate that there is a place in engineering for everyone with appropriate persistence and qualifications. Everyone needs help from others to succeed; this book will help you find the support you need to make the most of your abilities as an engineer. The world needs your enthusiasm, ideas, and contributions!

This book is based on 20 years of systematic research. The insights are derived from interviews with hundreds of practicing engineers, along with field observations from many engineering firms and projects in several countries. This research was a joint effort with many students and valued colleagues.

There is also specific guidance for working in low-income countries included in the text. One of the most exciting discoveries from recent research is that the social, cultural, and economic environment strongly influences engineers’ performances. This insight can help engineers in low-income countries navigate the socio-cultural complexities that frame their daily practice. This guidance has the potential to greatly improve enterprise productivity, creating enormous social and economic improvements in low-income countries.

Chapter 1 describes engineering and the challenges ahead. Chapter 2 explains engineering practice and how the book should be used with the Professional Engineering Capability Framework document to guide and record all learning progress.

Chapter 3 explains the essential first step: finding paid engineering work.

Chapters 4–8 cover critical perception skills that are commonly neglected in formal education, with pointers on how to improve them while finding work. Chapters 9–20 explain the fundamentals of engineering practice.

Anyone who wants to boost their career prospects should go on to read my earlier book The Making of an Expert Engineer. It can help experienced engineers take their practice to more advanced levels.

Additional material for this book can be found at the book page on the publisher’s website: https://www.routledge.com/9780367651817.

The author’s webpage also provides additional material, enabling readers to access the Professional Engineering Capability Framework and other online supplements for both novice engineers and their supervisors at https://www.jamesptrevelyan.com/.

Chapter 1

Engineering: doing more with less

What is engineering? It can be a mysterious occupation. Many people imagine engineers design and perform complicated mathematical calculations. Some engineers do that, but very few spend much time on it. Others think that engineers build bridges or make cars. However, few engineers would know how to make or even fix a car. If you see an engineer working with tools on a bridge, something is probably very wrong. Get out of the way—fast! (Figure 1.1)

Figure 1.1 An engineer in the popular imagination: a man with a hard hat, working with a drawing. Images like this portray misleading stereotypes because real engineering has largely been a mystery… until now. (Photo: raxpixl at unspash.com)

Engineering is much more than what engineers do, although the path to understanding it is to understand engineering practice, which is what engineers actually do. Recent research has greatly expanded our knowledge of engineering practice, revealing that practically all engineers use the same ideas and methods introduced in this book.

Engineering is a knowledge-based profession. So, what does that mean?

In essence, engineers are people with specialised technical knowledge and foresight who conceive, plan, and organise the delivery, operation, and sustainment of man-made objects, processes, and systems. These engineered solutions enable people to be more productive: to do more with less effort, time, materials, energy, uncertainty, health risk, and environmental disturbances.

Most engineers organise their work into projects.

Project definition starts with engineers conceiving safe solutions for human needs, often helping clients better understand their needs and solutions in terms of engineering possibilities.

Working mostly with computers and simulations, engineers predict how well these solutions will work, as well as the cost to build, operate, sustain and, eventually, remove them. Engineers often predict the commercial benefits of these systems for customers and end-users. However, there are always uncertainties, so engineers also inform clients and investors about risks and consequences. Sufficient trust and confidence must be built before clients or investors are willing to provide financial support, long before any benefits from a project begin to arise. All of this work leads to a decision by investors to proceed with project execution, the second phase (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Engineers in a consulting firm discussing vibration measurements collected from a natural gas processing facility. Their client, a natural gas pipeline operator, requires assurances that there is an acceptably low risk of failure. Each of the engineers in this meeting has different expertise and experience, and they are utilising their collective expertise to arrive at a shared conclusion.

In the execution phase, engineers plan, organise, and coordinate the collaborative efforts of skilled people, guided by shared knowledge, to construct the chosen solution. Much of the effort is needed to ensure that the original intentions are implemented faithfully enough to achieve the expected technical and commercial performance. This is time-consuming work that usually involves many people. Solitary technical work, such as performance prediction, design, and solving technical problems, takes up much less time.

Today, engineers often collaborate in large teams with people in different parts of the world and different time zones. They plan, organise, and teach people to purchase and deliver components, tools, and materials, and then transform, fabricate, and assemble them to deliver the intended solution. They work with an agreed schedule and budget, handling countless foreseeable but unpredictable events that affect progress, performance, safety, or the environment. Later, they organise sustainment: operations, upgrades, maintenance, and repairs.

In the final phase, engineers plan and organise removal, disposal, and environmental restoration. Materials are often reused or recycled, while specific components are often refurbished and sold.

The ultimate objective is usually to satisfy client, investor, and end-user expectations well enough that investors will return and commission more projects.

In this way, engineering success stories almost always reflect the contributions of dozens (or even hundreds) of engineers and thousands of other people worldwide, building on decades of experience. They also reflect specialised ways for all these people to collaborate and share technical understanding, using methods that have evolved over centuries of practice, often encoded in organisational procedures.

Certainty is impossible with unpredictable activities by so many people. Natural variations in materials and the environment add even more uncertainty. Yet engineers have evolved systematic methods that provide amazing predictability. Few people watching the hair-raising exploits of aviation pioneers in the early 20th century could have imagined the amazing safety and reliability of modern air travel.

Engineering, therefore, is all about specialised technical knowledge built on science and mathematics, on the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author biography
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Preparation for an engineering career
• Part 2 Workplace learning
• Epilogue – next steps
• Online Appendices
• Index