Career Opportunities
Design and Engineering Industry Is a Paradox Pragmatists and theorists join forces to build working plants
JOSEPH J. JACOBS, President, Jacobs Engineering Co., Pasadena, Calif.
Paradox is the word which characterizes the intensity and extent of professional experience in the engineering, design, and construction industry. On the one hand, there is hardly any greater opportunity for the young chemical engineer to use the broadest range of his academic training. The problems he must solve look almost exactly like those in the chemical engineering books he has been studying for four or more years, a similarity unmatched in other industries. On the other hand, our industry offers the rudest awakening, the bluntest impact, and the most vivid examples of the gap between academic training and what really happens in industry. Today's graduates are more intensively trained and have a better grasp of the technical subtleties than ever before, but the old warning that things are done differently in the industrial world still holds. Nowhere are the differences more accentuated, more intense than in our part of the chemical industry. Therein lies the paradox. Because we have to design and build complete plants that work, we must call upon every technical skill and theoretical foundation of our profession. The paradox appears with the realization that there are many ways to make something work; there are many correct answers to most problems. This multiple choice is contrary to most of what we've been exposed to in school. The ability of the engineer to accept nontechnical influences while still retaining his professional integrity is the toughest training job that industry must do. Because ours is a service industry, our clients will rarely let us do this training job at their expense. We are, however, avidly looking for young engineers with two to five years' industrial experience and with enough basic academic background to handle complex technical problems. Indeed, our severe shortage is process engineers. Process
Engineer
At the process engineering level, the young engineer finds the closest approximation to his academic training. Solving problems of heat and material balances, unit 20A
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operations, thermodynamics, reaction equilibria, process flow diagrams, and sizing equipment for a wide variety of processes are daily fare. Slide rules, calculation sheets, and, in recent years, computers are the tools of the trade. A process engineer is almost always a chemical engineer. Early in his career he will be introduced to the special restrictions of a very tight schedule. He will be subjected to continuing pressure from the project engineer to "quit designing it and let's build it." He will be forced to learn the technique of making rapid process design decisions and to rely more and more upon previous experience. The final phase in the process engineer's training is his assignment to the shakedown and start-up of a process unit. He will be amazed at the countless testing steps, safety precautions, modifications both large and small, purge runs, and preliminary runs which must be performed before a unit is producing a specification product. After living through the frustrations of a complex plant start-up, the young engineer is immensely rewarded to see something emerge from his slide rule and calculation sheet and become a vital, productive facility. Project
Engineer
At the project or staff engineering level, there is much more contact with other phases of the business organization, such as administration, accounting, estimating, and design than there is at the process engineering level. As project engineer, the young engineer has the problems of client, cost, and his own management to add to his purely technical concepts. He first meets head-on the problems and frustrations of meeting budgets in money, meeting budgets in time, and meeting people who have a variety of capabilities and desires. As project engineer he is no longer involved in the detailed process design, but now has to concentrate on hardware—not how to do it but what to do it with. The project engineers must recognize the importance of what has been called "supermarket" engineering. Despite what he's learned in college about heat transfer, there are companies making heat exchangers who know more about the subtle technical details and complex theory of heat transfer than he does.
Therefore, much of the design of new plants consists of selecting from the available supply equipment manufactured by specialists which will best fulfill the over-all requirements of process and plant. One should not minimize the intellectual requirements for making these selections. It takes a very well-trained chemical engineer with a fundamental understanding of theory to relate the basic design of the equipment being offered to the needs of the process and the client. After the equipment has been selected, the engineer has to write requisitions and work with other groups, such as material control, expediting, and purchasing, who are his aides in handling paper work in an orderly manner. In his role as project engineer, he will be exposed to all the other engineering disciplines—civil, electrical, mechanical, and the like. He will need to know enough about these disciplines to judge their effects upon the successful completion and ultimate performance of the project. Finally, he will have to meet the special problems of field construction where the dollar effect of schedule delays is most dramatically demonstrated. Project
Manager
The project manager's function requires not just engineering know-how but maturity and judgment—he serves virtually as president of a small company dedicated to one task only, designing and building a plant for a client at minimum cost and schedule. From the start of engineering and design, through construction, the project manager has complete responsibility for the project. He has to deal with all phases of his company's functions from accounting, labor contracts, purchasing, and management, to dealing with the client and the public. With the inherent responsibility of his job, the project manager must often decide between alternate recommendations involving substantial sums, with no chance for any lengthy study—but this is a responsibility he cannot abdicate. Having the ability to face these responsibilities, both easy and hard, is the primary personality trait that characterizes a project manager. To put it boldly, a project manager has to have guts. The primary difference between the project manager's and the project engineer's function is that the project manager must divorce himself from engineering details. He must organize and plan, and he must know the strengths and weaknesses of his staff. One added attribute which becomes important at the project manager level is sales ability, in selling ideas, recommendations, and the like to management and the client. The frustrations of a project manager are many. He meets daily the frustration of dealing with people. He has to work long hours on his project. He is often away from home. He faces new communities and environments in his new projects. He is constantly in the middle between the need for his own company to make a profit and the need to protect the client's interests. Maintaining a harmonious relationship between company and client and keeping the proper balance of loyalties is quite a task. Management
and Sales
Project managers often enter into company management. Here, the basic problems of management and the characteristics required of the management people are the same as in other industries, with but one important difference.
In other industries outstanding technical knowledge is a plus value, but not an absolute necessity. However, the engineering, design, and construction industry, by its very nature, makes it virtually impossible for one who is not an extremely capable engineer to assume over-all management responsibilities. Many young engineers associate sales work with the hideous caricature of a back-slapping extrovert that is a common misconception. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good salesmanship, in fact, requires outstanding engineering knowledge as well as an ability to communicate. Salesmanship requires that the ideas, products, or services being sold be able to withstand rigorous engineering analysis. The good salesman is the one who can defend the engineering basis and evoke confidence in the integrity of his engineering ideas. In short, the reality is that one cannot have real sales ability in our industry without first being an outstanding engineer. In general, the pay scale in the engineering, design, and construction industry is higher than for equivalent experience in other industries. Generally, this high salary scale has been associated in most engineer's minds with a corresponding instability of employment. It is true that the construction industry is cyclic and that the total employment of engineering-construction companies will vary considerably, depending upon how much plant construction is going on. However, most of this swing is in the drafting and design personnel. There is really much more stability for graduate engineers than has been commonly supposed. Indeed, most companies have been working assiduously to overcome the spectre of risk that dissuades many young engineers from becoming a part of this exciting business. Through the use of paid overtime, proper overhead allocation, preparation of standards during slack periods, and other devices, we can show a stability of employment not thought possible 10 years ago. Pension plans, paid vacations, major medical insurance, bonuses, and even profitsharing plans are now provided by many companies. From my viewpoint, admittedly prejudiced, there is no other opportunity for the young chemical engineer that offers the excitement, the challenge, the rapid assumption of responsibility, the chance to make important decisions— the testing of the very substance of a man—than that which exists in the engineering, design, and construction industry.
Dr. Joseph J. Jacobs is president of Jacobs Engineering Co., a chemical construction firm which he founded in 1947. His previous experience includes three years as research engineer with Autooxygen, Inc., two years as senior engineer with Merck b- Co., and four years as vice president and technical director of Chemurgic Corp. Dr. Jacobs attended Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he received a bachelors in chemical engineering in 1937, a master's in chemical engineering in 1939, and a doctorate in chemical engineering in 1942. He has published 15 papers and patents in various fields of chemical engineering and has been a contributing author of Kirk and Othmers "Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology." Dr. lacobs is a member of ACS, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the editorial advisory board of CirEN. MAY
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