Technical Competency and the Work Environment
by Dennis L. Feucht
Innovatia Laboratories
The grand enterprise of technology accommodates a wide range of skill sets,
allowing individuals of widely varying abilities to participate in productive
technical work. Those of us who have achieved an engineering level of competence
each have a history of personal development, and no two are the same. One
chief engineer I know at a major electronics company started as a technician.
The paths to greater competency are sometimes surprising and can be unpredictable.
At all levels each individual brings to the laboratory or field a unique skill-set. An experienced technician can often accomplish tasks that an engineer might never have tried. Yet technicians are usually not hired to do engineering and engineers are not hired to be technicians. There must be some rationale to the assessment of competence at various levels.
What are these competence levels? They have, over time, become somewhat formalized, and it might be good to reflect on this rating system, if that is what it is, and on what to make of it.
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