• Question: To what extent has your engineering background required you to be skilled in the analysis of technical reports or information?

    Asked by Sarah N x to Ashley, Catherine, John G, Laura, Ray on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Engineering teaches you really valuable skills like logical reasoning, communication, teamwork and looking at problems & solving them analytically. This makes it a lot easier to read technical reports (although some of them are really really boring. Just like books, it all depends on who wrote them).

      Sometimes when reading reports or press releases you notice what they don’t include which might be deliberate. They might hype up one area to hide that they are really poor in another area. Also, you might be wary of some of their results, for example some papers say a certain type of solar cell has a 14% efficiency – but does that mean that all of their solar cells got that efficiency on average or was it only one, the best of a bunch. You learn not to take everything at face value.

    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      This is a critical function of the job. If you cant break something down into simple pieces, then its very difficult to work as an engineer. Sometimes they can be too complex and it requires further work to understand them but usually you can get there with a bit of persistence.

    • Photo: Ashley Culbert

      Ashley Culbert answered on 15 Nov 2014:

      For my job I have a team of engineers that write technical reports. I have to read these understand what they say and to know when to question something if it doesn’t look right. A lot of this I have from experience. I’m a mechanical engineer reading reports from civil engineers. I always walk the sites myself so I know what they are like. Then when I get the reports I usually know what they will say and can question it if it looks different.

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Hi Sarah

      very much.. its actually the way that we formally communicate with one another.. ceratinly as one company to another.

    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Analysis is key to engineering I think – get as much information as you can from what is available and then make your best judgement on how to fix something/improve something based on this.

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