Personal and professional skills for engineers: one industry's perspective

Personal and professional skills for engineers: one industry's perspective

by J. D. Connelly and J. C. R. Middleton

This paper on the nontechnical skills required by engineers wovking in the oil and gas industly is based on a survey conducted during theJfil.st quartes of 1995 which dealt syec$cally with emyloyers' opinions ofi the personal

and prOfessiona1 skills required by their engineers. T h e survey also canvassed the views Of employers on what additional training in spec@ areas would bene_fit ifecent graduates and mofre matwe engineers.

Introduction

he UK oil and gas industry has contributed over A100 billion pounds in tax since oil first flowed 20 years ago. The impact on employ- ment and economic prosperity is particularly

marked in the Grampian Region of Scotland. Mid 1995 figures showed 46 500 people in Grampian were employed by firms directly involved with the industry'.

Recent years have seen the industry become more streamlined and cost conscious. New initiatives have been adopted in a bid to secure the long-term viabdity of the industry. Prominent among these initiatives are partnering, CRINE (Cost Reduction Initiative in the New Era) and an increased focus on safety following the Piper Alpha tragedy and the Cullen Report. Partnering arrangements, whereby oil operators award long-term contracts to major contracting companies who in turn offer a full range of engineering services, have become popular since the concept was introduced in the early 1990s. In addition to a changing business environment, other factors such as enhanced oil and gas recovery methods, decomnissioning and abandon- ment will have an impact on the skdls engineers need to acquire and develop.

In order to identie the personal and professional skills required, a cross-section of employers in the oil and gas industry were surveyed as part of an ongoing research programme into the education and training of engineers in the oil and gas industry

The issue of personal and professional skills has been on the agenda of higher education institutions (HEIs)

for a number of years. It is accepted that engineering students need to develop personal and professional slulls in addition to achieving technical conipetence if they are to be successful as practising engineers. Benyon stated that 'all courses should be seen as vehicles for developing the more generally applicable skills that need to be acquired, irrespective of the discipline studied".

There are acknowledged limits to what an undergraduate course can achieve. Schools of engineering need to take account of the sMls most valued by industry so as to produce engineers who are able to contribute effectively at an early stage in their career.

The purpose of the survey was to ascertain, from a sample of employers in one industry, the importance of engineers possessing specific personal and professional slulls. The survey only related to 'active' engineers, that is, those who are currently engaged in the practise of engineering. Engineers in a managerial position were excluded. A postal questionnaire was iksued to 109 companies in the UK oil and gas industry. These companies represented a cross-section of operators and contractors involved in engineering, construction and operational support services. The questionnaire was addressed to senior managers responsible for the training and development of professional engineers and 53 (49%) responded.

Personal skills

Engineers in the industry work largely in multi- disciplinary project teams. They interact with

ENGINEERING SCIENCE AND EDUCATION JOURNAL JUNE 1996

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colleagues from other subject areas, such as finance and contracts, as well as with engineers from other engineering Isciplines. This workmg environment demands that engineers cultivate their personal sk~l ls . We wanted to ascertain how employers felt about engineers possessing certain personal slulls and how much importance they attached to these skills. We therefore asked employers to indicate for a given list of skills whether they considered it essential, very important, important, not important or not relevant for their engineers. The results are graphically presented. in Fig. 1.

To give a clearer picture of the personal skdls employers favoured the responses were ranked and the top three slulls identified were:

(1) written communication s k d s (2) oral communication skills (3) teamworking skills.

The remaining seven were ranked as follows:

(4) decision malung (5) time nianagenient (6) ability to manage and participate in meetings (7) presentation slulls (8) leadership (9) delegation

(10) coaching/development of others.

As can be seen, communication s l d s were top of the list along with teamworkmg s l d s . This came as no surprise in view of the strong bias towards teamwork in the industry and the fact that engineers interface with

a variety of customers both external and internal to the organisation. Set against a background of cost containment and the increasing number of partnering arrangements, the abhty to communicate effectively should not be underestimated.

When we questioned find-year undergraduate engineering students at our university earlier this year on the s l d s and knowledge they considered would be most useful in their future careers as engineers, it was found that the ability to function as part of a team and communicate effectively featured prominently in the results. Ths indicates that prospective engineers are conscious of the importance of developing personal slulls during their undergraduate course and would appear to be thinking along the same lines as our sample of employers.

Professional skills

As an engineer’s career develops it will proceed through a series of stages which require different types of training and experience. The demand for management slulls increases at the point in an engineer’s career when there is a change &om technical specialisation to becoming responsible for planning and co-ordinating projects. Ths usually marks an engineer’s introduction to management.

However, evidence3 is available that shows that some managerial skills and knowledge are needed even in first jobs. Ths would suggest that the education of engineers should include aspects of management which relate directly to their work as an engineer.

In order to determine the management subjects that HEIs should be trying to incorporate into engineering

100%

90%

80%

a, 70% m

$ 60% 0

50%

I

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Personal skills

1 Essential

Very important

Important

Not important

n

Fig. 1 Personal skills


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100%

80%

a, U) +. f 60% e Q

40%

20%

0%

Elements of management

Essential

Very importani

Important

Not important

Not relevant

Fig. 2 Management knowledge

courses, we asked employers w h c h aspects of management their engineers needed to know about. They inhcated the level of importance they attached to each element listed on the questionnaire and Fig. 2 gives the percentage of responses.

The ranked outcomes indicated that an ability to see engineering in a broader business context and knowledge of the information technology and systems supporting business operations were of prime importance. More general aspects ofmanagement were judged to be of greater importance than the specialist discipline areas such as marketing and personnel.

As many of the engineers in the oil and gas industry are usually employed, as part of a team, on specific projects, this requires particular skills and abilities. Employers were asked which elements of project management their engineers needed to know about in order to be effective contributors to a project. When the results were analysed, it was found that employers deemed the ability to manage time, cost and quality to be the most important factors. This is undoubtedly influenced by the cost reduction philosophy prevalent in the industry and the need for engineers to control their designated activities to ensure the project is completed on schedule. Reinforcing this outcome was the fact that project planning and control techniques were the next most valued elements.

Additional training by category of engineer

Employers were asked to indcate if any of their engineers, in either category specified below, would benefit from adhtional training in specific areas.

Category 1: Engineers who have gained an engineering qualification in the last 5 years

Category 2: Engineers who gained an engineering quahfication more than 5 years ago.

The aim was to test the hypothesis that engineers in Category 1 would require less training in areas such as communication skdls, information technology and teambuilding slulls since a conscious effort has been made on the part of HEIs to develop these skdls. If engineers are able to acquire transferable skills during their undergraduate education it enables them to operate more effectively in the workplace and also reduces the initial investment in training.

Table 1 gives the percentage of respondents who inhcated that their engineers would benefit from additional training in the areas specified. There are 3 main areas in which additional training would benefit the engineers in Category 1: oral communication slulls (74%), time management (72%) and written communication shlls (68%).

When we considered the comments made by our final-year undergraduate engineering students we found that they thought they had been given too little opportunity to acquire oral communication skills. In just one skill area we have identified a problem in that employers want their engineers to possess oral communication slulls; prospective engineers know employers value such slulls but the students believed they had not been given sufficient opportunity to acquire them.


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Category2

45

55

58

ment of others 28

57

28

43 45

47

30

36

43

dustrial relations 17 25

51

The need for addtional training in these areas could reflect the nature of the positions held by these engineers. Their expected involvement in selecting and deploying engineers in teams formed for specific projects and their role as coach or mentor where they guide more junior engineers goes some way to explaining the training requirements in these areas. Since their career has probably taken them to a level where they have greater responsibhty for and control over specific tasks or projects, that in itself requires a more dsciplined approach to work coupled with the abhty to juggle commitments. This would also expl.ain the training needed in financial matters.

Technological advances require all engineers to update their knowledge regularly. However, the engineers in Category 1 wlll probably have been exposed to the latest technology and applicati’ons during their technical education, thereby reducing their need for training in this area so soon after graduation. This is in contrast to the engineers in Category 2, whose experience of information systems and software may have been acquired less formally;

alternatively they may not have had the opportumty to keep up-to-date m t h new apphcations.

There is clearly an opportunity for HEIs to address the training requirements of both categories of engineers in the areas identified, via short course provision as well as through the continued development of undergraduate programmes

Concluding comments

Clearly, HEIs \N111 have to coiitiiiue to ensure that provision is made for the development of personal and professional shlls and that the results of such efforts are closely monitored. This wdl ensure that graduates are adequately equipped with the optimum balance of shlls and abdities as required by industry. It should be stressed to students that their technical abhty has to be supported by a range of

The survey was conducted by The Strategic Development Unit in Engineering Education, a unit established with funding from BP Exploration and based at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.

References

1 Grampian Regional Council: ‘Oil and gas prospects’. Grampian Regional Council Economic Development and Planning Department, 1995

2 BEYNON, J. D. E.: ‘Higher education for capability. Update 1’ (RSA, London, 1989)

3 FAULKNER, A.C., and WEARNE, S. H.: ‘Professional engineers’ needs for managerial skills and expertise’. Universiq ofBradford, UK, Report T M R 15A, 1979

4 COURT, G., JAGGER, N., and C O N N O R , H.: ‘The IES annual graduate reviem- 1995-96’. IES Report 296

0 IEE: 1996

The authors are with the Faculty of Science and Technology The Robert Gordon University, Schoolhill, Aberdeen AB9 1FR, UK.


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Understanding electromagnetism Dear Sir-I was most interested in the articles by John Carpenter in the December 1993 and October and December 1995 issues of ESEJ. The treatment of electromagnetisni which he describes will surely do niuch to demystify the subject, and I have found that it is very helpful in such ‘simple’ questions as:

(a) How does one calculate the voltage drop between two points on a long straight conductor carrying alternating current?

(h ) In specifications for earthing of high-voltage sub- stations, the ‘voltage to remote earth’ is an important concept, but what does it redly mean in an AC system, where the reading you get depends on the path taken by the voltmeter leads?

However I feel that the persuasiveness of Dr. Carpenter’s argument is duninished by his expositions of ‘anomalies’ in the conventional theory based on the E and B vectors. For example, the ‘action without reaction’ example in Fig. 1 in the October 1995 article shows an apparent inconsistency with Newton’s Third Law of motion, which disappears as soon as you remember that the primary current must flow in a closed circuit, and the relationship between flux and induced voltage depends on this fact. The induced voltage in a circuit is proportional to the rate of change of flux enclosed within the circuit and it is immaterial that the lines of force do not intersect the path traced out by the circuit. A similar argument applies to the ‘conductors in slots’ problem in the December 1993 issue.

Also I feel that Dr. Carpenter overstates his argument that the B vector is hard to understand. Every schoolboy knows (or used to) that, if you place a piece of cardboard on a horizontal bar magnet, sprinkle some iron filings on to the cardboard and tap the edge, you can actually see the B field. In consequence it is not very difficult to visualise the production of EMF in a generator by ‘lines of force’ being ‘cut’ by a moving conductor. Thus, the concepts of magnetic field and flux were built into the theory from an early date, and they have served the profession well.

The main area of difficulty is as follows. The induced voltage in a circuit is given by Faraday’s Law:

where the B field is integrated over any surface bounded by the closed circuit in which the induced voltage is to be calculated, and a nominally ‘open’ circuit is completed by the voltmeter leads. Unfortunately this expression does not apportion the voltage drop amongst various parts of the circuit. Thus it is of limited value in many problems where we wish to split an assemblage of circuits into a number of lumped components so that we can set up the equations and work out where the current flows and how

many volts appear at various points. An example is in AC transmission lines where it is very diajcult to assign impedances to individual conductors unless there is some obvious geometrical synlnietry in the circuit. No doubt the same difficulty applies to high-frequency phenomena and the associated EMC problems in the tracks of a printed circuit.

At first sight, the A field is not particularly helpful. The textbook treatment of the subject goes somewhat as follows. By definition:

curl A = B

Thus by Stokes’s theorem:

$4.. = jjB.dS

and so Faraday’s Law can be rewritten as:

i.e. we replace the integration of B over a surface by integration ofA round the same closed path for which we require the EME Itjuct so happens that:

i.e. the magnetic vector potential due to a current density J in a small volume element dz is inversely proportional to the distance ’from the volume element. The complete A vector at one point is found by integrating over all such volume elements. So, the induced EMF in a circuit is connected in a simple way to the currents in the conductors.

Moreover the B vector does not appear in the calculation. However, according to the textbooks we are still dealing with closed circuits.

At this point Dr. Carpenter wades in and asserts (in effect) that we can strip away the integration signs and state, as in eqn. 7 of the October 1995 article, that:

dA at

E = - -

at any point in the circuit, or indeed at any point in empty space. So, it is indeed possible to define the AC voltage from a substation to remote earth, and the voltage drop in a long straight conductor, independently of the path taken by the voltmeter leads.

Eqn. 7, and the relationship of the A field to the current, are both so simple that it must surely be possible to arrive at them without using the appalling mass of vector calculus to which we are customardy treated. Is it possible to proceed from the original observations of Amp&re, Oersted, Faraday et al. to eqn. 7 without mentioning lines of force? And, how does one predict the


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forces and EMFs on the conductors of an electrical machine without plotting the B field through the iron core and the air gaps?

E WATERLAND (MIIE) London

[Dr. Carpenter replies-Mr. Waterland provides an admirable summary of the role of A and he also identifies a key point. Because we must take care in stripping away the integral signs, E is not, in general, the same as -dA/dt, since we can add in any additional component of voltage which makes no net contribution in a closed circuit. Stated mathematically,

E = -grad p d A /at

which I am glad to add explicitly to my article. Here is the electric scalar potential, describing a voltage ‘hill’ on which we do no net work when we arrive back to our starting-point. What we expend in carrying a cha.rge ‘uphill’ we recover on coming down again. The important practical point is that 9 defines what we mean by ‘capacitance’. EMFs cannot be induced in clcised circuits by capacitive interactions, but depend on the ‘magnetic’ effects which are described (and defined) by A*.

I agree entirely on the simplicity of the concept offlux, as revealed by iron filings, and on its practical value. But it is this very simplicity which causes problems, by leacling many engineers to take all too literally the picture which it conveys of empty space occupied by bristle-like enti ties attached to magnets. The results are shown by the extent of the literature which this has generated on the apparent problems and anomalies of induction, including such questions as ‘What is meant by flux cutting?’ ‘Dipole’ has pointed to some again very recently?. One consequence is a failure to recognise the key role of the grad9 component of E, as illustrated, for example, by the transformer, whose operation depends on the balance between the grad9 and d A / d t terms in the windmgs, where E must be zero if the windings are resistanceless. In general, E is a measure not of the induction, dA/dt , but of the resistance. It is the explanation in terms of Bux

which can be so misleading, as, for example, in the not uncommon claim that, since flux linkage is essentially a property of a closed circuit, induced EMFs cannot be attributed to the various circuit parts, in direct conflict with what is predicted by A.

The account of the generator in my Fig. 1 (October 1995) was necessarily brief, and Mr. Waterland may perhaps have misunderstood it. Changes in the coil current, and in the flux which it produces, will cause a force on 2, but t h s is not directly relevant, as is shown by connecting the constant-current generator in series with the winding. The movement of 4 will still induce an EMF, and a corresponding energy flow out from the coil, but lack of any change in time means that the current can produce no E, as well as no B, at 4. Thus the usual approach predicts no force on 2, or energy input, and this, surely, will appear anomalous to most engineers. Perhaps I should add that the conductor-in-the-slot problem has likewise attracted much attention in the past because, although the flux linkage approach does give the correct result in the complete circuit, it appears to lead to a failure in the ‘flux cutting’ law in predicting an EMF which is due, explicitly, to motion. The loss of B, as the permeability of the surroundmg iron increases, implies not only that the velocity of the conductor is not dxectly relevant, but that the flux-lines must sweep across the slot interior at a speed whch eventually exceeds the velocity of light. Some writers viewing the bristles as entities codess to considerable unease at what appears to them as anomalous behaviour.

I am most grateful to Mr. Waterland for help in clarification. I feel sure that his complaint about all of that vector algebra will strike a chord with many, and I suggest that there is, indeed, no need to base electromagnetism on the conceps of flux, or lines of force. We can follow Maxwell in the use of B as a symbol for the differential of A and observe that some guidance on applications such as forces and EMFs in machines is provided by the numerical packages, solving for A, which are now commonplace.

*This assumes an appropriate choice of ‘gauge’, or div A. ‘(Micromatters’ IEE News, 4th April 1996, p.14 1

The Internet for !ic’ Brialn

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Written specifically for the engineering and scientific community, the book covers how to get online, using the newest access and search tools, and how to use the network to find what you need. To give you a flying start, there are also some 200 pages of online resources across a

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Personal and professional skills for engineers: one industry's perspective