Transferable Skills for Reliability

I have always found that there are three elements of a reliability professionals skill set, they are, in order of importance:

1) Their implementation and "doing" skills.

2) Their knowledge of reliability theory, application and methodologies

3) Their knowledge of specific asset types and engineering disciplines. 

The first area is 100% transferable. Once you can turn ideas into reality in one company or industry, you have the foundations to do it in any company or industry. The third one is a little more specific and also a little less important. 

For example, you will only get experience working with Dragline reliability from the Mining industry. Period. Nothing else can give you that. But the good thing is that if you have good knowledge of reliability theory, application and methodologies...then that can be easily adapted to virtually any industry. (Any that I have come across anyway)

So what are the transferable RE Skills?

In my opinion there are three groups of these, and your relative strengths in each depends on what you actually do.

Please note: Being able to say that you can do some of this stuff is not enough! You must have a verifiable track record of achievement in an area before you can claim it as a strength.

Thats not always the case, sometimes there are people who will accept your word for it and give you the job...but there isn't too many managers like that out there.


(I think this would form the basis for a fantastic trainee-ship of some sort)

Maintenance Administration

• Maintenance planning and scheduling (Ideally this would include an appreciation of the power of time and motion studies)
• Shutdown / Turnaround planning and Scheduling
• Work reporting, KPI's and efficiency data analysis. (Like delay codes etcetera)

Reliability Engineering

• RCM understanding and track record. (Fundamental) This also means an understanding and preferably track record in FMEA, FMECA and other associated areas. 
• Weibull analysis and track record (Great to have)
• RAM modelling (Great to have)
• Root cause analysis and problem solving (Again, great to have)
• And behind all of this, an understanding of reliability theory.

We could go into areas like Finite Element Analysis, RBI or SIS - but these are specific rather than general and would be essential for people working specifically in that field. 


Regardless, the core concepts above still stand out as must have skills for a reliability professional I think.

Technical Knowledge (Not asset based)

• Real strength in at least one of the condition monitoring and/or NDT techniques
• A broad appreciation of CBM/NDT techniques, technologies and capabilities.
• Data analysis techniques and tools. (Not the high end stuff, the Excel / Access type stuff)

Lots more stuff in the other two areas. Particularly around issues like benchmarking, holding reference information on great performance, presentations, managing change and lots more. 


But for core reliability skills I think these cover it. Any others that strike you as core and essential?