The Soft Skills Reliability Engineers Need with Fred Schenkelberg

In every industry, people skills contribute a lot to the success of an employee. The thing is that engineers and especially reliability engineers are not taught soft skills like change management and communication strategies across different facilities in the maintenance and reliability oriented organizations. The reason that engineers don’t have enough soft skills because organizations don’t have enough time or resources to do this. Most of the times, an organization just doesn’t realize how important it is to be able to communicate the procedures in the right way to the people that are concerned with it.

It is very easy to follow a procedure that has been followed for a long time. But if that procedure changes because of the new technology or new problems, people need to know in detail and someone should be able to walk them through all of it. No one likes change when it is sudden and they don’t understand the need for it. So, the engineers should be able to communicate the benefits of the change to the technicians and everyone else involved in there. It is very critical that change is communicated to the right people at the right time and in the right way.

Then the engineers need to have the ability to engage with the others in the meetings. There are different things that need feedback from everyone in the meeting to implement that modification in a successful way. People in the room should be able to engage in productive talks that will lead to lessons learned. Everyone should be able to give feedback and the other people should be able to understand and facilitate—the management and leaders—those ideas. They should be able to trend those practices and bring behavioral change in the organization.

There are a lot of other soft skills such as listening, explaining, and observing that help engineers perform well in their routine jobs that require input and engagement with other people in the facility. So, a good engineer understands the value of these skills and uses them to drive and trend the change in the organization. He realized the importance of the change management and he uses a different combination of soft skills to manage their jobs and responsibilities well for the mutual benefit of theirs and the organization. The reliability engineers should be able to fit well in the environment.

They should know the work motivators that help change the organizational culture. They know the lay of the land to be able to motivate different people to do different but amazing things that they should be doing to make themselves better at their jobs. They build the trust among the personnel so that the change management is continuous and long term. There are a lot of courses and training programs that can help engineers make themselves better at the communication part of their jobs. The organizations should do whatever they can to make the engineers realize the importance of this and help them develop these skills further.

Eruditio Links:

• Eruditio
• HP Reliability
• James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
• Reliability Report

Fred Schenkelberg Links:

• Fred Schenkelberg’s LinkedIn
• Speaking of Reliability Podcast
• Accendo Reliability
• Soft Skills for Reliability Engineers

143 – The Soft Skills Reliability Engineers Need with Fred SchenkelbergJames Kovacevic

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