Learning Engineering Practice

Learning Engineering Practice

by James Trevelyan
Released January 2021
Publisher(s): CRC Press
ISBN: 9781000289336

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Book description

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.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Table of Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Author biography
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. Part 1 Preparation for an engineering career
    1. 1 Engineering: doing more with less
      1. Transforming the planet
      2. Engineering disciplines
    2. 2 Engineering practice
      1. How to use this book
    3. 3 Seeking paid engineering work
      1. Fear of failure
      2. Stage 1: Preparation
        1. Step 1: Create your job-seeking diary, build your job-seeking contact list
        2. Step 2: Start building your network of contacts
        3. Step 3: Prepare your résumé and online profiles
          1. Common mistakes
          2. Review your online presence
          3. Key attributes
            1. Leadership
            2. Teamwork
            3. Initiative
            4. Persistence
            5. Reliability and responsibility
            6. Local work experience
            7. Ability to learn from experience
        4. Step 4: Expand your engineering knowledge: research suppliers
        5. Step 5: Expanding your knowledge and skills
          1. Standards
          2. Programming
          3. Contractors
          4. Material, labour, and component costs
          5. Logistics
          6. Economics
          7. Predictions
      3. Stage 2: Visit engineering suppliers and potential employers
        1. Step 6: Planning
        2. Step 7: Visiting engineering suppliers
        3. Step 8: Continue researching new job opportunities
        4. Step 9: Visiting a prospective employer
        5. Step 10: Follow-up opportunities and consider starting your own business
      4. Relocating for opportunities?
    4. 4 Neglected perception skills
      1. Perceiving reality
      2. Prior knowledge influences perception
    5. 5 Listening
      1. Practice exercise: observing listening lapses
      2. Active listening and paraphrasing
      3. Writing accurate notes
      4. Contextual listening
      5. Helping others to listen
      6. An imperfect, interactive, interpretation performance
      7. More listening and note-taking exercises
    6. 6 Reading documents
      1. Practice exercise: reading documents to learn from them
      2. Practice exercise: written requirements
    7. 7 Reading people
      1. Avoid email and text messages for sensitive conversations
    8. 8 Seeing and creativity
      1. Why is sketching so difficult?
      2. Practice exercise: evaluate your seeing skills
  10. Part 2 Workplace learning
    1. 9 Learning the ropes
    2. 10 Engineering knowledge
      1. Knowledge and information
      2. Types of knowledge
        1. Explicit, codified, propositional knowledge
        2. Procedural knowledge
        3. Implicit knowledge
        4. Tacit knowledge
        5. Embodied knowledge
        6. Contextual knowledge
      3. Knowledge transfer
      4. Acquiring new knowledge—learning
    3. 11 Knowledge is a social network
      1. Mapping knowledge
      2. Distributed knowledge
      3. Distributed cognition
    4. 12 Making things happen
      1. Step 1: finding a peer
      2. Step 2: discovery, organisation
      3. Step 3: monitoring—another discovery performance
        1. Contriving casual encounters
      4. Step 4: completion and handover
      5. Informal leadership, face to face
      6. Social culture
      7. Practice exercise—knowledge network mapping
    5. 13 Working safely
      1. Identify hazards
      2. Identify hazardous events
      3. Identify likelihood, consequences, and risks
      4. Risk control measures
      5. First steps
      6. Cultural influences
      7. Human behaviour
    6. 14 Making big things happen
      1. Information, knowledge, and diversity
      2. Project life cycle
      3. Project planning
      4. Negotiate and define the scope of work, calculate the time schedule
      5. Specifications
        1. Test specification
        2. Method specification
        3. Inspection and testing plans
        4. Responsibility for inspections and testing
      6. Risk analysis and management
      7. Approvals
      8. Final Investment Decision (FID) approval
      9. Monitoring progress—continuous learning
      10. Completing the project
    7. 15 Generating value
      1. Innovation, research and development (1)
      2. Product differentiation (2)
      3. Efficiency improvements (3)
      4. Reducing technical uncertainties (4)
      5. Performance forecasts (5)
      6. Inspection, testing, and design checking (6)
      7. Project and design reviews (7)
      8. Compliance with standards (8)
      9. Reliable technical coordination (9)
      10. Teaching, building skills (10)
      11. Social licence to operate: co-creating value with communities (11)
      12. Sustainment: operations, asset management, and maintenance (12)
      13. Environmental protection (13)
      14. Defence and security (14)
      15. Small and medium enterprises
        1. Product and process improvement, research and development, and anticipating future developments
        2. Collaboration
        3. Business development research and understanding customer needs
        4. Cost monitoring, control, and reduction
        5. Risk management and reducing uncertainties
      16. Balancing value generation with cost
      17. Quantifying value generation
      18. Learning more
    8. 16 Estimating costs
      1. Estimating
      2. Labour cost
      3. What does it cost to employ you?
      4. Low-income countries
    9. 17 Navigating social culture
      1. What’s different?
        1. (1) Respect for authority
        2. (2) Navigating the labyrinth of social power
        3. (3) Misunderstandings on labour cost
        4. (4) Documentation and organisational procedures
        5. (5) Language barriers
        6. (6) Centralised decision-making
        7. (7) Access to financial information
        8. (8) Learning from specialised engineering suppliers
      2. Some products can succeed
      3. Think in terms of value generation
      4. Outsourcing
      5. Opportunities
    10. 18 Sustainability
      1. Climate change
      2. UN sustainable development goals
      3. Overcoming resistance to change
      4. Renewable energy
      5. Efficiency gains, new ideas, or behaviour change?
      6. Opportunities
    11. 19 Time management
      1. Understand daily physiological patterns
      2. Classify tasks
      3. Adapt your schedule
      4. Keep records
      5. Schedule major tasks
      6. Allocate time to help others
      7. Say “no” by saying “yes”
      8. Defer or delegate: documentation and filing is the key
      9. Unforeseen disruptions, avoiding overwork
    12. 20 Frustrations
      1. Frustration 1: Working hard is not getting me anywhere
      2. Frustration 2: I can’t get a job without experience and advertised jobs require experience
      3. Frustration 3: Admin, meetings, accounts, and procedures: this is not what I was educated for
      4. Frustration 4: This job does not have enough intellectual challenges for me
      5. Frustration 5: Has this been done before?
      6. Frustration 6: Constrained by standards?
      7. Frustration 7: Yearning for hands-on work
      8. Frustration 8: I can’t get other people to understand my ideas
      9. Frustration 9: This company is run by accountants
      10. Frustration 10: They always cut the maintenance budget first
      11. Frustration 11: They are only interested in the lowest price
      12. Frustration 12: Net Present Value (NPV) shows the project is fine—why don’t they approve it?
      13. Frustration 13: My skills and knowledge are only valued in rich countries
      14. Frustration 14: I would much prefer a job where I could do something to help people
      15. Frustration 15: My emails go unanswered
  11. Epilogue – next steps
  12. Online Appendices
  13. Index

Product information

  • Title: Learning Engineering Practice
  • Author(s): James Trevelyan
  • Release date: January 2021
  • Publisher(s): CRC Press
  • ISBN: 9781000289336