Wednesday November 2nd at:
Room 2.45
School of Mechanical Engineering
Fairway Entrance 3, University of Western Australia.
The presentations for this workshop were all recording using lecturnity. (Download Lecturnity Player to view recordings from here). Each presentation includes the powerpoint slides and audio recording. The documents range in size from 4 - 22 Mb depending on duration.
Note that the presentation audio recordings include question and answer sessions. Since the microphone was located near the presenter, some of the questions may only be heard very faintly.
Some of the presentations are preceded by short introductions from James Trevelyan. Click the author's name to see the abstracts (below).
9.00 Registration
9.30 James
Trevelyan: Introduction and framework
of engineering roles and results from the early interviews
Lecturnity presentation / Flash presentation
10.10 Leonie
Gouws: Research proposal – Engineering
maintenance management work
Lecturnity presentation / Flash
presentation
Morning tea break -----------------------------------------------------
11.00 Adrian Stephan: Research proposal – Engineering maintenance work with aging equipment.
11.20 Ernst Krauss: Research proposal – Engineering design work
11.40 Ruza Ostrogonac: Eastern European engineers in Australia
12.10 Markus Petermann: Effects of culture differences on design engineering work
12.30 Lunch (sandwiches) ------------------------------------------
14.00 Vinay Domal: Research proposal – Comparison of engineering work in Australia and India
14.20 Sally Male: Evaluating graduate engineer attributes
15.00 Lee O’Neill: Engineering student perceptions of engineering work: a longitudinal survey
15.30 Afternoon tea break ------------------------------------------
16.00
Sabbia Tilli: Engineering migration to Australia
Lecturnity presentation / Flash
presentation
16.30 Lesley
Jolly: Catalyst Project at University of Queensland
Lecturnity presentation / Flash
presentation
17.00 Refreshments (University Club – at own expense) ----------------
James Trevelyan Introduction and framework of engineering roles and results from the early interviews
We have completed around 40 interviews and this paper presents results of analysis of Australian engineering interviews in that set. We are deliberately not restricting our research to “the engineering profession”. Instead we have identified about 80 distinct roles. Example include design, ‘acceptance testing’, ‘building and leading teams’, and ‘coordinating other people’. Each role is further structured as a set of activity modes such as ‘prepare CAD models and drawings’, ‘sift through documentation and find relevant information’, prepare report(s)’, etc. We are documenting the nature of technical knowledge and where it comes from. This reveals that much of the technical knowledge that engineers need is learned after leaving university courses and most is never written down. The implications are singificant. Since technical knowledge is difficult to transfer and acquire, a lot of engineering depends on bring people with the required knowledge together and sharing it to the extent needed to solve problems, create products and provide services.
Adrian Stephan Research proposal – Engineering maintenance work with aging equipment
The proper maintenance of a machine requires the application of a wide range of technical and analytical skills using many technologies over many decades.
When someone repairs a machine, what knowledge is required, where does it come from and how is it learned?
This research is the analysis of maintenance work practices so that assumptions and instructions of what needs to be done are based on the reality of the job or the tasks to be accomplished is fully understood.
Bucciarelli notes that in dealing with technology that we take for granted that engineers, managers and corporate strategists don’t fully understand what they are doing.
Given the myriad of technical and analytical skills required to maintain a machine, the situation is further compounded. How does a fitter know what they are doing is right. It might work, but is it what needs to be done?
For example. Maintenance budgets often account for a significant part an organisation’s expenses. Maintenance people are usually budget driven. But, where do they learn about maintenance budgets? A quick review of the index of most accounting textbooks will show that words such as maintenance, repair, spares, etc are not included. So, we assume that accountants are not directly taught about maintenance either, so where and how do they learn about it?
Sabbia Tilli: Engineering migration to Australia
Like other developed countries Australia imports skilled labour, including engineers, to meet labour market requirements. Despite the demand for skilled labour, there are claims in the migration literature about 'brain-waste' of skilled migrants in host countries. To investigate if 'brain-waste' is an issue for engineering migrants, this paper reviews census data to compare if the employment and occupational experiences of skilled migrants in Australia with foreign engineering training with those of the locally born or child migrants. The investigation was inspired by a Canadian study (Boyd & Thomas 2001) and follows similar methods.
The result of the study shows that, in general, those with foreign engineering qualifications and training, have poorer labour market outcomes than the locally born and those that migrated as children and have Australian engineering qualifications.
Three factors emerged from the study as influencing labour market outcomes for foreign trained migrants: duration in the host country; level of educational qualification; and region of origin.
A noteworthy statistic that emerged from this study is that approximately 50% of the native born and 60% of the foreign born in Australia with an engineering degree appear not to be working in the engineering industry. This is rather startling, considering the cost of funding engineering education and the numbers recruited to work in Australia to fill the demand for engineers in the workforce.
Vinay Domal: Research proposal – Comparison of engineering work in Australia and India
The presentation consists of a talk about the recent research proposal approval from the UWA graduate research school. Basically I am interested to present the objectives of the project, research design and how it is go fit into the major project "The Nature of Engineering Work". My project aims to understand engineering services such as water supply, energy and construction can be much higher in real dollar terms in developing countries than in an industrialized countries like Australia. We hypothesized that the different working methods and techniques adopted in these countries is contingent on a better understanding of roles engineers perform. The intended final outcomes of the research will be discontinuities and commonalities in the way engineering work is done in different countries as well as roles of best engineering practices.
Sally Male: Evaluating graduate engineer attributes
Are engineering graduates suitably prepared? For what should graduates be prepared? The context, curriculum and pedagogies of engineering education have transformed in the last two decades. Universities need standardized frameworks for evaluating their program outcomes.
This presentation outlines my PhD project, to develop a survey instrument to measure the generic competencies of engineering graduates. The project will identify the competencies to be measured, and develop an instrument to measure these by surveying workplace supervisors of graduates.
Markus Petermann: Effects of culture differences on design engineering work
Design engineers
see themselves confronted with a need not only to perform their work efficiently,
but to do so in collaboration with design engineers
from all over the world, which hence have entirely different cultural backgrounds.
Cross-cultural collaboration requires design engineers to have additional social
skills.
To provide a foundation for properly defining these skills, this research focuses
on the identification of factors in the backgrounds of design engineers that
influence the ways they perform cross-cultural collaboration. These factors
will be determined using a socio-scientific approach, i.e. design, conduction
and analysis of a survey among design engineers performing cross-cultural collaboration.