People skills are very important in the field of industrial engineering,
says Charlene Yauch. She's a professional engineer and director of the Industrial
Engineering Program at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
"One of the interesting things about industrial engineering is that it
is very much a people-oriented engineering profession," she says. "Many other
engineering disciplines are working with things rather than with people. For
example, a mechanical engineer might be designing a motor or an electrical
engineer is designing a computer, [while] industrial engineering focuses on
what we call processes and systems.
"We're trying to design the flow of work and we're trying to analyze not
only the machines and software and technology that are employed, but the people
and how they interact with the larger system."
Industrial engineering involves a lot of collaboration, Yauch says. You
can't make things run smoothly, or change how things operate, without getting
the cooperation of others.
"Basically you're going to go in and change somebody's job, or you're going
to change their work processes, and if you do that you need to be able to
get them interested in what you're working on," says Yauch. "It's very much
a collaborative type of job, where you need to be willing to work with other
people to get it done. So it's helpful to have those kinds of social skills."
It was the people aspect of industrial engineering, combined with the technical
aspects, that drew Yauch to this field.
"I got my undergraduate degree at Purdue, and we had a semester long intro
to engineering where we heard about different types of engineering, and I
enjoyed the speaker who spoke about industrial engineering," says Yauch.
"She definitely emphasized the fact that industrial engineers work more
with people, and I found that part appealing.
"IEs (industrial engineers) also work a lot with data analysis, and so...it
was being able to use that technical foundation but also do a lot with analyzing
data and working with people and processes."
Chris Blackwood trains engineering technicians. His background is in civil
engineering, which overlaps a fair bit with industrial engineering.
"[Industrial] technicians and technologists are primarily focused on the
manufacturing sector, or they're involved in the design, fabrication, repair
and maintenance of machines," says Blackwood.
Blackwood offers the example of a water treatment plant: "Whereas the civil
engineering technician might be responsible for the overall building maintenance
or possibly the construction or the expansion or design of a new plant, the
mechanical or the industrial person would be responsible for the pumps and
the electrical motors and power supplies and those types of things...
"The industrial and the mechanical [technicians] are primarily more interested
in the machines, the motors, the electrical power supply -- that type of stuff
-- whereas the civil [engineers and technicians] are more interested in terms
of the steel, the concrete components, the plastic piping -- those types of
parts."
Blackwood says engineering technicians, whether they are civil, industrial
or mechanical, tend to be male. But that's starting to change.
"We are seeing more and more females entering the trade, so from the point
of view of gender I think the opportunities for a technician or technologist
are just as valid for a female as they are for a male," says Blackwood.
"But the industry as a whole is still a bit of a rough and
tumble kind of industry, meaning that you are often in an environment where
you are dealing with construction or you are dealing with trade unions, you're
dealing with construction workers," Blackwood adds.
"So you have to be able to manage yourself and have a lot of self confidence
on the site, as well as have the intelligence in order to make the decisions
necessary in order to get the job done."