entire matter again. State your intentions and reasons so that your manager can properly reconsider it.

Despite the responsibility to do exactly as instructed or agreed, you will sometimes want to prove your initiative by doing not only that, but also something in addition thereto; perhaps the next logical action has become clear; perhaps a promising alternative has come to light. Doing these within reason will make your drive and inventiveness immediately apparent.

The other side of this law is that you needn't be too eager to embrace agreed-upon instructions. In general, a program laid down by your manager, a department, a project leader, or a design team is a proposal rather than an edict. It is usually intended to serve only as a guideline, one that will have been formulated without benefit of the new information that will be discovered during its execution. The rule therefore is to keep others informed of what you have done, at reasonable intervals, and ask for approval of any well-considered and properly planned deviations.

{ REGARDING RELATIONS } WITH COLLEAGUES AND OUTSIDERS

Cultivate the habit of seeking other peoples' opinions and recommendations.

Particularly as a beginning engineer, you cannot hope to know all you must about your field and your employer's business. Therefore, you must ask for help from others. This is particularly useful advice during a confrontation of any sort; a good first question to ask is "What do you recommend?" Your confronter will usu~ ally have thought about it more than you have, and this will allow you to proceed to a productive discussion and avoid a fight.

A warning about soliciting others' opinions deserves mention. Condescending attitudes toward others and their opinions are gratuitous and unwelcome. If you have no intention oflistening to, properly considering, and perhaps using someone's information or opinion, don't ask for it. Your colleagues will not take long to recognize such patronizing and to disdain you for it.

Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and important instruments in a well-ordered business.

Many engineers try to dodge making commitments. You must make promises based upon your best esti-mates for your part of the job, together with estimates obtained from contributing departments for theirs. No one should be allowed to avoid the issue by say-ing, "I can't give a promise because it depends upon so many uncertain factors." Of course it does. You must account for them, estimating best and worse cases, and then provide neither laughably padded nor unrealisti-

46 mechanical engineering I October 2010

cally optimistic schedules. Both extremes arc bad; good engineers will set schedules that they can meet by energetic effort at a pace commensurate with the significance of the job.

A corollary to this law is that you have a right to insist upon reasonable estimates from other departments. But in accepting promises from other departments, m ake sure that you are dealing with a properly qualified rep-resentative. Bear in mind that if you ignore or discount other engineers' promises you dismiss their responsibil-ity and incur the extra liability yourself Ideally, other engineers' promises should be negotiable instruments in compiling estimates.

Dorothy Kangas, a business process improvement spe-cialist for The Nielsen Co., said that despite the many tools and techniques available for managing a project, sound estimating of resources and schedules is funda-mentally important: "Getting reliable estimates is key to creating and m aintaining a project schedule."

Kangas, who contributed to the Project Management Institute's A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, has seen both extremes: "Engineers or proj-ect team members sometimes provide estimates based on the assumption that every task will be executed on time; that nobody goes on vacation, nobody is sick, and absolutely no other factors interfere with the sched-uled activities. I've seen others try to pad every one of their tasks. Suddenly what seemed to be a realistic product development project will take twice as long as expected." But Kangas noted this as well: "A good project manager probably knows which engineers are pessimistic and which are optimistic and tries to work the middle!"

One area that is often overlooked in planning projects, according to Kangas, is risk. "If there are uncertain factors, or risks, those should be compiled and managed according to their impact and likelihood of actually occurring," she said.

Furthermore, according to Kangas, project risks and project issues are two different things; risks can be predicted and managed, whereas issues arise unpre-dictably throughout a project. So risk management activities should be scheduled into a project right from the start, but issues must be squeezed onto the schedule as they appear.

In dealing with customers and outsiders, remember that you represent the company, ostensibly with full

responsibility and authority.

You may be only a few months out of college, but most outsiders will regard you as a legal, financial , and tech-nical agent of your company in all transactions, so be careful of your commitments.

{ To Be Continued }

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growth of par I

Will the power industry need

engineers?

Will it hire them as before?

When will jobs open up?

Certainly.

Probably not.

No comment.

Jack Thornton is a frequent contributor. and is principal of MINDFEED

Marcomm in Santa Fe. N.M.

By Jack Thornton

he convergence ofBaby Boomer demographics, rising demand for electricity, and the state of America's electricity infrastructure are shap-ing up to create a major job market in the United States for early-career engmeers.

The convergence points to a need by the power indus-try to hire thousands of new engineers (and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other workers) by 2030. Giv-en the long time horizon, however, the ways in which these career opportunities will work out for engineers are marked by many questions. Although basic career requirements can be summarized from discussions with power-generation companies and industry associations, no one is willing to predict when jobs will open up, or w here the money will come from to finance the future of electricity in the U.S.

America's electricity infrastructure appears in need of a massive overhaul and rebuild. To accommodate an ever-increasing demand for electricity and new smart grid technology on the horizon, the electric utilities foresee about $500 billion worth of projects running through 2030 and beyond. Similarly large investment numbers are cited for the nation's transmission and dis-tribution grid that links generators, motors, computers, light bulbs, and everything in between.

What's more, 45 percent of engineering jobs in the pow-er-generation business "could become vacant" by 2013, according to the Center for Energy Workforce Develop-ment. The projection is based on demographics-the huge percentage of Baby Boom engineers now nearing retirement age, plus normal attrition and staff turnover.

The center, a Washington, D .C. non-profit, was founded in 2006 by the Edison Electric Institute, the American Gas Association, other industry associa-tions, and many utility companies across the country. Launched when the utilities' demographic situation was first recognized, the center's primary focus is education and training for all power-generation job classifications, including engineers.

The average utility worker is 48 years old, about five years older than the median age for all U.S. workers.

According to Margaret M. Pego, chief human resources officer and a senior vice president at Public Service Enterprise Group in Newark, NJ., that puts her com-pany and other energy providers in an uncomfortable position. "The energy industry is one of the first to feel the effect of Baby Boomer retirements," she said.

The utility industry got into this demographic bind with deregulation in the 1980s. As power prices fell, revenues dropped and margins shrank; tens of thou-sands of jobs were eliminated. Subsequent mergers, downsizing, and hiring freezes pushed tens of thou-sands more out of the industry. Between 1990 and 1997, for example, after most deregulation, employment in "electricity services," which includes power-generation, fell19 percent from 454,000 to 368,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Monthly Labor Review of September 1999.

According to the Edison Electric Institute, there are about 32,000 engineers of all types in fossil-fueled power generation and in transmission and distribution.

Just to make up for expected retirements and attri-tion, about 15,000 engineers will need to be hired. If and when the U.S. electricity infrastructure is rebuilt, two to three times as many engineers may be needed. The report, "Power Engineers and the Electric Utility Industry," is a few years old, however. It was presented to the National Science Foundation Workshop on Nov. 29, 2007, before Great Recession started.

M ary Miller, vice president of human resources with the Edison Electric Institute, the industry association for investor-owned utilities, pointed out that the high percentage of industry workers reaching retirement eligibility is not the only challenge. Coupled with those retirement concerns, is the industry-wide expectation that electricity demand nationally is expected to grow in spite of the economic slowdown, she said.

When the recovery and expected expansion get under way, "we will need electrical and power-systems and nuclear engineers first," Pego said, "Then, as the power systems area expands with more transmission lines, the

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worth of projects running through 2030 and beyond

smart grid, and more generation sources, civil engi-neers, mechanical engineers, computer engineers, and linemen will be added."

A spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute said, "All our estimates of engineering openings are based on the workforce development data ... We need electrical engi-neers and nuclear engineers and the skill sets thereof. How many in each category, and where, really depends on how the companies are focused when the retire-ments occur."

When will jobs open up? It's anybody's guess. Where will the money for expansion come from?

Again, no easy answers. Estimates of capital needed range well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Credit has tightened for everyone and utility credit rat-ings have slipped.

The recession has caused unprecedented back-to-back drops in yearly U.S. electricity output. Output fell by 1 percent in 2008 and 3.7 percent last year, the steepest drop since 1938. From 1998 through 2007, however, electricity production grew an average of 1.4 percent a year. The Department ofEnergy, in the Short-Term Energy Outlook update for June from the Energy Information Administration, has forecast a 3.1 percent increase this year and another of0.9 percent for 2011.

T he back-to-backdrops hit utility revenues hard. Hir-ing freezes followed, along with more layoffs, delays in project starts, and outright cancellations. Many believe cutbacks have not yet run their course. At the same time the power-generation industry is restructuring as companies seek to optimize their fleets by fuel , to stress operating efficiencies more than ever, and to seek a bal-ance between regulated and unregulated operations.

50 mechanical engineering 1 October 2010

WHOM THE UTILITIES SEEK

A ggregate numbers such as 45 percent of a workforce hide as much as they reveal. To fill in the details , Mechanical Engineering interviewed key people at representative utility companies. Despite the current cutbacks, hiring freezes, and

other uncertainties, " longer-term, the utility industry's demand for mechanical engineers will stay strong," said Mark Gray, vice president for engineering services and chief engineer for generation at American Electric Power Corp. AEP, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest U.S. generating companies. It operates 80 generating stations in the U.S with a total nameplate capacity of 38,000 megawatts.

Gray has corporate responsibility for all engineering in the company's generating plants. His team has just over 300 engineers, technicians, designers, and administra-tive staff Of them, about 160 are graduate engineers, and 85 to 90 are MEs. Individual power plants, he noted, are staffed mostly with MEs and electrical engi-neers plus a growing number of chemical engineers.

A common question is whether today's senior engineers will be replaced one for one as they retire. Gray says no, not in numbers and not in tasks. "There is going to be some reduction in staffing," he said, including reduced workloads with standardization, automation, and newer engineering technologies. (This was explored in an article, "Positions of Power," in the January 2010 issue,

which is available online at www.memagazine.org.) In the future an increasing number of engineers

"may not necessarily be AEP employees," Gray said. "We will use m ore and more contract services such as