[Themaintainers] What Do Engineers Do All Day?: Innovation, Maintenance, and Everyday Engineering

[Carmen & J.P. Pascoli]

Congratulations Lee. You are definitely on to something with this project.
As young mechanical engineering student in the early 90s, I was taught many
subjects to shape me, and inspire me, to become a design engineer, because
that's what engineers do, right? Wrong. The truth is I spent about 2 years
doing design, 2 -3 years doing project management, and the last 20 years
working in operations in a number of industries in the roles of maintenance
engineer, reliability engineer, maintenance manager, maintenance
engineering manager, and now director of physical asset management and
reliability (largely centered on maintenance of assets). An in those 20
years I've often wondered why I was never exposed to anything in school
that would have helped me in these roles. I have had to seek out rare
continuing courses and literature to self-teach. In Canada, non-profit
PEMAC (Plant Engineering & Maintenance Association of Canada - www.pemac.org)
was formed in part in recognition of this fact, and was the first (that I
know) and still one of the few to offer education for industrial
maintenance management with it's MMP (maintenance management professional)
course. This university elective-worthy 200 hour, 8 part course is now
being delivered by a great number of teaching institutions across Canada
and with an on-line delivery model at one school, has attracted individuals
from around the world to take part.

Finally, your referenced survey of Swedish engineers was accurate with it's
conclusion that 70% of engineers work in operations and maintenance. I have
worked in 4 different industries and in every one of them, more engineers
worked in operations & maintenance than any other department. Yet these are
not areas in which we educate engineers.

Look forward to what comes out of the project and glad to help if I can.

J.-P. Pascoli, P.Eng, CMRP, CAMA
Director, Physical Asset Management & Reliability
Cameco Corporation
www.cameco.com

On Tue, 21 May 2019 at 14:55, lee vinsel <lee at themaintainers.org> wrote:

> Hey, everybody.
>
> I was happy to learn a few weeks ago that a project I proposed with some
> Virginia Tech Engineering Education colleagues was funded by a center here.
> The project will examine the kinds of occupational roles engineering
> graduates end up in - in part to drive home the point that most engineers
> are operators/maintainers and very few fall categories of
> invention/innovation/or even design. I wrote a blog post because I thought
> some people might interested and hopefully to encourage more research in
> the space.
>
>
> http://themaintainers.org/blog/2019/5/21/researching-what-do-engineers-do-all-day-innovation-maintenance-and-everyday-engineering
>
> The post includes a link to an extract from the proposal just in case some
> people want to go deeper on the project.
>
> Best,
>
> Lee
>
> --
> Co-Director
> The Maintainers
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