First of all, what is an engineering technologist? For anyone who isn’t familiar, in the engineering world there are three different professions that work together in the engineering design process.
First is the engineer, who typically operates at the higher-level theoretical space and come up with design ideas and plans. The engineer’s design gets punted to the technologist, who excels at applying the science and engineering facts to bring the design closer to reality. Next stop for the design is the engineering technician, they’re one step closer to the tools end of things. Technicians can often be the one creating the technical drawings and doing the design checks before products go out the door.
As a word of caution, the following is from my own experiences and not the result of any formal HR studies or best practices published by official institutions. Your mileage may vary. So with that stage set, on with the show!
A great engineering technologist has to be an effective communicator. This is true for the typical reasons of working in a team environment, communicating with clients and all those other things that come down to being human. More relevant to the profession though is that our work can be viewed as translating engineering plans into engineering work. For example, the engineer thinks of the best heating distribution system to apply for a building design (theoretical) and gets the technologist to size and select the equipment.
A great engineering technologist understands model numbering. Model numbers are one of the most powerful things to understand in energy engineering, and also the source of my biggest pet peeve. They’re powerful because they describe all the technical details you need to know about the equipment – the equipment family, the size, required voltage, special options, design revisions and so on. The pet peeve follows the Mitch Hedberg bit about his former roommate’s approach to abbreviation: “just start spelling it, then quit!”. Too often I see model numbers truncated because they don’t fit nicely in a text block or they’re handwritten so people get lazy. The result is losing the information that describes the part in question. The thing to remember is model numbers are like words, you need to spell the whole thing in order to communicate exactly what you mean.
A great engineering technologist always includes the units. Simple, I know, but I think it’s a rule of the universe that the work you do in haste and leave off the units is the work you need to reference 6 months down the line and have to re-trace your formulas to figure out if that’s a conversion factor or a straight value or just garbage. Keep it clean, use your units, make all your teachers happy.
A great engineering technologist understands breadth-first over depth-first. Design projects can get complicated, or just are complicated in general, and having depth-first thinking will sink the project every time. Cover everything in one pass at the same level of detail so the whole design is a shippable product, then dive back in to add details when needed. This comes up in technical design but also happens quite a bit with writing. It’s a hard concept to teach some people, and I still get caught by it sometimes myself. I think it has to do with being a problem solver getting hooked on “chasing down” the solution. Either way, just remember to step back and build your framework, fill things out as you go before refining.
A great engineering technologist knows how to make the numbers tell a story. We analyze data all the time and are no strangers to formulas and spreadsheets, but at the end of the day you can only use so many numbers to get an idea across before people get confused and check out. Understand what numbers have the biggest impact and which ones are routinely killed off by rounding errors. Think of how the number is being used in a report: are we trying to reinforce a positive or highlight a negative? In some cases, we don’t have the luxury to frame the number, it’s reported in a specific way because of convention or procedure. In those cases, it’s up to us to use our words and explain what it really means. I could say your building has an EUI of 37 but without context it’s not clear what we’re trying to say. Also notice the missing units?
A great engineering technologist knows how to research. A lot of the job is reference and research, and lots of the procedures you follow and workbooks you use came from research. The holy trinity in my world are the ASHRAE books, Technical Resource Manuals and the help manual. The first two for the dense but pure technical knowledge and the last one because as a technologist, you’re bound to have a few pieces of software under your belt and more often than not, slowing down to read the manual solves the problem faster than trying another option or clicking something else. Of course, those three are for specific cases. For general research and getting started with a topic: Google.
I’ll probably write more about this in time, that’s part of the intent with this blog after all. It’s a voice of one but after so many different design problems and project and clients you start to see patterns of what matters and what mistakes to learn from.