Prof. James Trevelyan | Engineering Learning & Practice Research Home Page
This project is based on a loosely defined team of academic staff and research students with an interest in human behaviour in the context of both engineering education and subsequent professional practice.
One of our aims to create a comprehensive description of engineering practice. Another is to add to our understanding of how young people learn engineering, both formal learning (e.g. at university or college), and experiential learning on the job.
We also aim to describe engineering skills in general terms that are independent of any specialised discipline such as mechanical or reliability engineering. We are studying engineers at work to discover how, when and why they acquire certain skills in different environments. We want to understand which skills are most important for early career development. This will not only provide a sound basis for engineering curriculum development, but also help companies find better ways to develop the skills of their engineers.
A modern society and economy is dependent on engineering skills that determine how effectively technology can be utilised. Engineering contributes a major proportion of GDP in any industrialised society and even the least industrialised societies depend on engineered services such as transport, electricity, irrigation water, food storage and distribution to support agriculture and subsistence farming.
Despite the economic importance of engineering skills there appears to be no comprehensive description of the work of professional engineers or where and how they acquire skills after graduation.
Our research on engineering work started with the observation that engineering projects in developing countries can be much more expensive than one might expect: often more than in an industrialized country. A combination of anecdotal evidence and direct experience suggested that high costs in developing countries might be due to significant differences in engineering skill development after graduation compared to industrialised countries.
In 2003 we started a program of detailed qualitative interviews with practising engineers in both Pakistan and Australia. Apart from basic demographic information the interviews include open-ended questions to prompt each respondent to talk about different aspects of their work and perceptions. The interviews cover their education, career history, current duties and responsibilities, technical issues, perceptions of clients, training and career development, organisational and human resources issues, attitudes to migration, and even experiences of corruption and dishonesty.
An extensive review of the literature on professional engineering has shown, to our surprise, that very little has been written about what engineers actually do. Much has been written about engineers, but nearly all accounts are based on pre-conceptions rather than observations. This explains why much of the work written about engineers seems to be based on inaccurate perceptions. Sociologists and economists often regard engineers as purely "technology workers". Another model, popular among engineers themselves and some engineering academics, describes engineering as a combination of technical knowledge gained in university courses and management skills acquired either informally or through postgraduate education. Engineers progress from largely technical work in their early career and take on increasing management responsibilities. Many senior engineers tell us that they do almost no technical work at all in their later careers. In our interviews, several engineers have found it difficult to articulate the training needs of young engineers in their early careers. "They need to learn the difference between theory and practice" is a common way that engineers describe this learning process.
The research literature focuses on two main issues: engineering education and engineering management. Only about half of this literature is based on empirical studies and the rest is based on anecdotal evidence. Empirical work on education tends to be based on surveys that ask engineers to rank a preconceived list of skills and attributes in order of significance. A large proportion of engineering management is prescriptive. Some very carefully designed surveys have been conducted to discover which skills are most important for engineers and where skill development is needed. The lists of skills tends to be based on earlier reports or management research. Much of the management literature is highly selective, for example investigating linkages between R&D engineers in high technology firms. All the literature we have found assumes certain skill sets and asks survey respondents to rank their importance, masking the contribution of tacit skills and knowledge that is not explicitly articulated.
We have not yet found contributions that examine common aspects of engineering practice in different disciplines. We have not found any reports that evaluate the relative significance of formal engineering education and early career learning, or the effects of education differences on subsequent career development.
These gaps in the literature have forced us to re-evaluate the goals of our research project. For the time being much of our research will be directed at understanding the work and career development of engineers in Australia. We have decided not to focus on one specific discipline. Instead we are attempting to describe the work of engineers in non-discipline specific language so that we can see common aspects of engineering work in different disciplines. By doing this, we have discovered many types of engineering activities that, apparently, have received little or no previous recognition in the literature.
There seems to be strong interest from industry in some of the issues covered by our research. Apart from the obvious issue of early career development of engineers, some companies are concerned about maintaining technological capabilities that have been built up by visiting experts from other countries on short-term contracts. Other companies are interested in improving asset management because this consumes such a large proportion of their ongoing operating expenses. (Asset management is a term used for a comprehensive approach to maintenance engineering that aims to maximise the utilisation and productive lifetime of existing engineering assets such as process plant, vehicles and machinery, infrastructure and so on.)
Currently we see the project developing in several directions.
First we continue to observe practising engineers through field studies and interviews. Conducting the field studies and interviews, preparing the transcripts and analysing the results is expensive, however, so we are examining alternative research techniques.
We have commenced an extended longitudinal study of our own engineering graduates using regular on-line quantitative surveys to follow their career development and work patterns.
We are studying the relative under-employment of engineering migrants from certain regions, particularly South Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. One hypothesis we plan to test is that these engineers develop a different set of skills in their early careers in their native countries. There seems to be a significant mis-match between the skill requirements for Australian engineers and migrants from these regions. By understanding this issue in more detail it should be possible to create productive career development opportunities for migrant engineers from these regions and significantly reduce under-employment in the long term.
We are studying many aspects of maintenance practice and engineering asset management using similar methods. Research elsewhere and anecdotal evidence shows that even well-organized companies seem to be losing between 20 and 40% of their gross revenue because of operator and maintenance mistakes. This is a surprising result: the potential for improvement is huge. Well-known techniques such as reliability centred maintenance and total productive maintenance have been proposed to fix these problems but they don’t seem to work in practice. Often there are severe problems with the quality of data in computerized maintenance management systems that provide the basis for these methods. There seem to be complex human factors that prevent improvements from being made using these and other methods. We don’t yet have answers: what we have found is an almost complete absence of systematic research. Without research, improvement can only be based on guesswork and this might explain why most current methods seem to fail in practice.
This issue aroused our curiosity and stimulated the entire project to get started. We are continuing the original comparison study to understand why engineering is in difficulties in many of not most developing countries.
Some of the current research projects being undertaken by group members are:
• Studies of Engineering Practice
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Longitudinal Study of UWA Engineering Graduates
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Human Factors behind Early Life Failures of Subsea Equipment
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Studies on Migrant Engineers in Australia
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Researching Current Practices in Maintenance and Asset Management
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Researching Engineering Practice in South Asia
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Measurement of Engineering Graduate Attributes
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Tacit Knowledge Acquisition in Engineering Laboratory Classes
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Study of Engineering Review and Checking Processes
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Learning Styles of First Year Engineering Students
Industry projects have been sponsored by ANSTO, Chevron, Woodside, Tiwest, WA Water Corporation, Sunwater and the Centre for Integrated Engineering Asset Management.
Updated August 2007