I’ve had cause recently to reflect on the range of things we engineers are expected to do sufficiently well, even though we have had little or no formal training in doing them.
For example, a few years out of university, I was expected to be able to read massive piles of contractual documents with sufficient speed and precision to then write tenders for multi-million-pound plants. I had been provided with no education or training to give me a theoretical foundation for this and, at first, I had had no previous experience. Neither was I on a formal training scheme. I could ask some of the old hands in the office a few questions, but it wasn’t really their job to train me.
Luckily, I wasn’t aware then of the fact that, if it came to it, the courts would have expected me to have competence as an engineer straight out of university, and that they wouldn’t be interested in what I thought the contract meant – that would be the court’s decision. I say ‘luckily’ because if I had realised any of this, I might have never have done the job at all. I didn’t know how little I knew, and this carried me through to the point where I knew a bit more, and had a more accurate idea of the limits of my knowledge.
There are several areas that many engineers don’t know enough about to even recognise the limitations of their knowledge, and these aren’t just in the areas which we are all clear engineering degrees don’t cover. Incidentally, knowing what you don’t know is a key metric, in my view, of whether you know enough to act professionally.
If you understand that you shouldn’t offer opinions in areas outside your competence, you need to know the limits of your competence. If you are under the impression that twenty years as a proposals engineer or project manage makes you a lawyer, you are sorely mistaken, even if you obtained some legal qualification along the way. Lawyering is as practical a profession as engineering and you need to practice law to have a useful opinion.
Returning to our false friends – those things engineers think they understand, but often do not – I would place statistics foremost. Many pure mathematicians hate stats, and a lot of today’s engineering graduates tend toward purism. I on the other hand originally trained as an applied biologist, which requires a lot of reasonably advanced stats to make sense of messy data.
I consequently have a better understanding of stats than many engineers I have come across. I know enough to do my job, which often does involve making sense of a lot of messy data, but I would never offer opinion in court of statistics for two reasons: lawyers don’t understand stats, and neither do I. Not really. Not like a statistician does.
However, of greatest concern to me is the fact that so many process engineers can’t actually design a process. In fairness to them, no-one comes out of university able to do this. Universities produce junior researchers, who are made into engineers at the expense of their subsequent employers. I learned process design the same way I learned law, but at least some of the things I was taught in university could be used as a theoretical basis. Not that many, but some. After doing this for thirty years, I think I have mastered my little corner of the discipline. Nice to be master of one trade.
I also did a PhD, the subject of which was process design methodology. This was in the first instance pretty unhelpful, as it required me to engage with the academic perversion of the idea attributed to Socrates “I know that I know nothing”. Leaving aside the fact that one of the things we know we don’t know is whether Socrates ever said this, or what he meant by it, we don’t even need to know if it is true, or to discuss what the word “know” meant to him.
What is self-evident is that it is not a useful idea for practitioners. I’m more than happy to admit that designers never know the basis of their designs in a way that couldn’t be improved by a 25-year research programme. Our job as process designers is to use skilful judgment of just how little we know in various dimensions, along with some design rules which we understand the limitations of to produce a sufficiently and simultaneously cost effective, safe and robust design.
Ours is a highly multidisciplinary profession. But that does not mean that it is “boundaryless” as someone once said. There are boundaries, and it is our job to know where they are.
