Ten skills that cannot be missing in a maintenance engineer tool belt

When it comes to skills, you, as a maintenance personnel, must have some of them in order to perform your work. The reason why recruiters recommend write it down in your resume, and always ask a question related to skills is due to their importance in a daily work environment.

There are many, but the main skills are listed below:

·        Active Listening

·        Complex Problem Solving

·        Critical Thinking

·        Judgement and Decision Making

·        Mathematics

·        Operations Analysis

·        Reading Comprehension

·        Science

·        Time Management

·        Writing

Being a technician, engineer, coordinator or manager working in the front line of a maintenance company, you must have developed those skills, if not, you were probably born with them in order to deal with the maintenance circumstances. To start, a comment in front of each skill is crucial.

Active Listening: giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times. Sometimes we are pretending; we are not listening, but during the speech, we use to ask silly questions to show other people that we are paying attention. We also nod to show interaction. It is easy to identify if someone is listening to you. Just check the body language. Is he or she looking at you? Messaging on a mobile? The tip is: just be there, do not pretend. Or you turn yourself to an active listening or say that you are not up for that in the moment.

Complex Problem Solving: identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions. Those situations never happened at Monday morning. It seems to me that complex situation take place on Fridays or even weekends. Basically, to overcome, you have to revisit the preventive maintenance plans and better yet, the predictive maintenance, where the tendency will tell you the exactly time for intervention. Yes, the corrective maintenance crew must be ready, but everyone agrees that the lesser they are called the higher your MTBF indicator is.

Critical Thinking: using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems. I am certain that when you read “alternative solutions” a contraption came up to your mind. Despite some misunderstanding on this area, a contraption can be a solution; just make sure to reach the safety parameters before, and as fast as you can, enable the piece of equipment to recall its originality.

Judgement and Decision Making: decisions must rely on the consideration of parameters related to the situation such as safety, availability of parts, cost of downtime, availability of labor, replacement or repair, etc. To choose the most appropriate action, judgement of benefits and drawbacks from the potential decision must take place.

Mathematics: on one hand, using mathematics to solve problems is a reality, on the other hand we do not use all the complexity taught in University, so why all of it is part of lectures? The answer is simply to stretch our brain, to acquire capability to think fast and critically – most engineers have this skill developed.

Operations Analysis: analyzing needs and product requirements to create a design to approach with the demanding maintenance. Should I need to improve the plans? Using applied failure analysis to enhance reliability once the root cause is a clue of what might be changed in a project, operation or material composition.

Reading Comprehension: understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work related documents. Technical literature, operation manuals, best practices, salvage procedures, all are examples of what engineers may be aware and have an exceptional understanding.

Science: using scientific rules and methods to solve problems. Consider a handrail for example which is often breaking, you might use science to revel its issue. If it is vibrating, a cushion rubber may solve; it may be also necessary to reinforce the fastening elements such as weld bead, bolts or fittings. A challenge here is to discover the root cause and act on it.

Time Management: managing one’s own time and the time of others. That is a skill present in supervisors. As an illustration, imagine a variety of tasks to be completed in one shift, with one single team. Numbering what is urgent, essential or overdue is incredibly vital.

Writing: communicating effectively in writing as appropriate for the needs of the audience. Writing is fundamental when claiming a warranty, exchange information via email or preparing a technical report. Sometimes you have a predefined characters to fill the warranty form: it is better to be concise.

Knowing a description of each one, you may have seen yourself in some past occurrences which highlighted a desirable skill. To put in a nutshell, the ideal scenario to someone is a percentage of all skills listed in bullet points, but which one would be the principal for your area? the most desirable in the field, maintenance shop or industry?

Share your point of view in the comments by answering the questions above or even bringing another skill that might be missing in the list. Additionally, I invite you to share the article, hit the like thumbs up, and to dive deeply into this subject or other, let’s connect!