The secret weapon for advancing your maintenance career

Like most of us I am a gadget nutcase. I really started to depend on my iPod when I was frequently standing in immigration lines, and now it and my iPhone go everywhere with me. I have even looked into building my own maintenance and reliability gadgets on the iOS platform.

Developing tomorrow reliability engineers

The reliability engineering scene in Australia is a bit stale. By that I mean that nobody is actually doing anything to drive new talent into the industry. Companies are all chasing the established professionals, there is more work than people, and you end up with a situation where a lot of demand is chasing a few very talented people... and nobody is injecting new blood into the game.

Concerning and all headed towards an obvious end.

Added to this is the parasitic labor hire industry. Treating skilled people as commodities, dropping them as soon as a client has any issues, and competing with each other on price. Again, no efforts at all to inject new talent into the industry - just the urge to earn fees off the expertise of others for what is fundamentally an introduction service.

People who have had to bully, push, elbow and work hard to develop the skill set they are able to offer.

it all stinks...

My company is not going to do that. Sure, we will have our share of contractors, and one or two high level "reliability ninjas". But the goal is to get new and talented people into the discipline. 

Mechanics, electricians who are motivated and have done well, along with graduates looking for a career into niche areas of the industry.

Young professionals who I can send either through the remote education course at Monash (3 years) to get their reliability engineering degree - Or through the Business Asset Management post graduate degree (2 years) run by the University of Western Australia.

They leave early then they owe me the cash, they finish and decide to leave then good luck to them, that was the idea anyway and hopefully I will have produced some good and talented people on the way.

It isn't the "grab a warm body" business model that has been adopted by many labor hire firms parading as consultants, but hopefully the investment in inspired people will pay dividends in terms of sustainable business relationships.

All very exciting stuff...your thoughts?

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?

Not if you're ordinary please

I am about to move into a role where I will hire consultants. Part of my job will be to build a team of reliability consultants for asset intensive industries throughout the Asia Pacific.

I can't really tell you who I will be looking for, or what skills yet. But I can tell you what I won't be looking for.

I won't be looking for anybody who is ordinary. The problem with ordinary is that it is abundant. if you are going to be ordinary, then you had better be cheap. Because I can get ordinary anywhere.

I will be looking for those consultants who are above ordinary. The people who have been through the big jobs and survived. People with an enviable track record. Hopefully, people with a few holes in their CV where they took time to be a bit wierd.

Why? Because I like extra-ordinary people. My clients like extra-ordinary people. Clients will not pay for ordinary, and neither should they. Ordinary is everywhere.


If you enjoyed this post you can receive it in your email here. We don't like spam either and we won't send you any!