Engineer as a career? No, thank you .....

Engineering as a career? No, thank you…

7.1.2016

A prejudice Hardly anyone has an easy time choosing a career path after high school. Our author Peter Eyerer, professor of engineering, reports on his encounters with young adults who are facing this deciding question. The evening sun is shining and I am thinking about how I should start. An empty container of semi-bitter buttermilk stands next to me. The contents tasted good. My attention is attracted to the small printed text on the corner “Open here, dispose separately.” I pull on it. The colorful carton that has been assembled with glue dots reveals a thin inner polystyrene (PS) cup. Its paper base can be separated. Now I start asking typical engineer questions: - What an effort? Paper, printer ink, glue, synthetics. The complete product is called a hybrid container because it’s made up of various materials. - Why not use a basic material i.e. polystyrene and a used container for the middle layer as a kind of hidden recycling? - The cellulose fibers of the paper: are they recycled materials? - Separated, collected according to materials? What if not everyone does this? - Does printing on paper require more ink than printing on synthetic material? - When the thin cup is brought into the cycle does it have to be washed and dried? What’s the ecological footprint? - Wouldn’t incineration be the cheapest? Suddenly it becomes clear to me: A gigantic can of worms needs to be opened here. And who can answer these questions for me? A paper specialist? A synthetic materials expert? A production technician? An economist? A food packaging pro? A sociologist (jobs, health)? And what about logistics and quality control? Insurance, hygiene, product lifespan, transportation, recycling management, trade laws, tax laws, etc.? Which container is the best on the market? This as a whole is called product engineering. So what does this have to do with career choice? A Conversation

A high school graduate had absolutely no idea what he should do. His mother asked me to speak with him. “What are your strengths?” and “What do you like to do?” were my first questions. “Tennis and maybe economics.” -“What doesn’t appeal to you?” Answer: “technology” -“Why doesn't it appeal to you?” - “I went to a college lecture on mechanics, I can’t imagine doing something like that at all.” -“What did you like to play when you were a young boy?”, I continued drilling him. “I had a toy robotics building set.” - “And how was that?” - “Good, that interested me.” - “But technology doesn’t appeal to you.” - “No, the lecture was so dry and impossible to understand.” - “So you think that if you sit in a 45 minute lecture about technology that you can make a judgement about the subject and your future prospects? My interviewee became unsure. “Have you ever

worked in a company before?” - “No.” - “Have you ever repaired your bicycle, your scooter or a motor-bike?” - “Yes.” - “So how was that?” - “If you can find and fix the problem it is cool.” - “You really like playing tennis, which tennis racket do you prefer?” - “The CFK-Racket with a coated covering.” - “How do you know that it is CFK?” - “That is something that interests me.” - “But technology doesn’t interest you?” Do you realize that your are missing the depth of the most important career decision of your life? What were your grades like in mathematics, physics and chemistry?” - “They were all good.” A Scenario A company produces 300 million aerosol cans in four factories on 16 lines with 450 workers yearly. They have lost the ability to keep up with their competitors over the last years. The customers’ demands for lower-priced lighter weight cans can not be fulfilled. Orders are being lost. Your task as development engineer is to catch up with the competition within two years or else the company will have to minimize or shut down completely. Hundreds of families are relying on your team. How do you proceed? You analyze the competitor cans thoroughly. They are up to 20 percent lighter. To get ahead faster you suggest an integral, company-wide core team that meets quarterly to exchange information, discuss core issues and to come up with and offer solutions. Only stringent engineering will lead to achievement of the goal. Raw material analyses from external institutions have lead to the conclusion that a firmer and stiffer aluminum is a partial step forward. The cold-flow process has to be able to be simulated in order to choose an optimal ground geometry and to enhance finishing capacity both cheaper and quicker. The specialists in tool technology are to be motivated by contributing their expertise to the team. Nothing is to be taken for granted because we are developing new steps in the process. Additionally: manufacturing tolerance from the series is to be drastically reduced, a tedious procedure. Employees are to be trained, learning modules are to be developed. The different quality criteria from the various factories are to be harmonized. Conflicts between the production line and the quality control department keep flaming up. The sales department needs your technical expertise and invites you to give customer presentations. With the experience on the market, your work and developments are now customer focused. Whilst doing your shopping you go up to the shelves to have a look at the competitor’s products and you buy a few to dissect and research them further. Would you ever have thought that you would be secretly looking at aerosol cans at the supermarket one day? Now you have learned how unbelievably difficult the production of such aerosol cans is and you think about the families that that live from your work at “your company”. You start to reflect on what you can do to reduce the negative impact that 13 billion aerosol cans have on the environment. Your thoughts are locked on aerosol can engineering, thinking comprehensively: technical, economical, environmental, socially responsible. Such real-to-life situations, unfortunately, cannot be experienced in a college lecture. That is why it is so very difficult to choose a career path. You have to break out of the mental prison called “school” and want to have new experiences and want to discover unchartered territory and want to bring change and be creative. For example: open a small business, build something with your own two hands, help out in shops, look for internships in companies, don’t take the beaten path, fulfill your own dreams, recognize material problems and solve them, preferably in teams and non-stop. Then comes the question about your career choice, why? Because it becomes more and more clear over time which strengths you have and what you are good at! The choice for a career path starts in kindergarten and must be promoted by the the children’s parents. Which strengths does our child have? Gerald Hüther claims that “every child

is highly talented.” This is equally true for both boy and girls. They engage with technology equally yet their approach is different. The deficits lie within the psychological didactics. If parents implement the current brain and behavioral research pragmatically, we don’t have to worry about the next generation that will make up the world of technological and natural sciences. However, this requires keen objective observation skills, persistence over 15 years and time for our children.

An other decision The outcome will be that we’ll receive a totally different answer to our initial question:

Engineering as a career? Yes, please!

Peter Eyerer, Fraunhofer ICT, Karlsruhe, Germany