EDUCATION AND TRAINING The demand for high communications skills and team working ability - is the demand for these skills growing also in industrial maintenance? How is the education system prepared for this side? Being able to work in team settings and in cross functional projects, as well as to communicate, is a necessity for any kind of engineer, including those within maintenance and asset management. Maintenance is not an isolated function within a company – maintenance is carried out in order to reach production and business goals, and therefore planning, management and follow up, and continuous improvement is made in cross functional teams rather than in isolated isles. Take the standard EN 15628 for example, where key competencies are described. A maintenance engineer has to be able 1. to ensure the implementation of maintenance strategies and policies 2. to plan the maintenance tasks within their area of responsibility, defining and organizing the necessary resources 3. to organize, manage and develop the maintenance resources: personnel, materials and equipment 4. to ensure compliance with regulations and procedures related to safety, health and environment 5. to ensure technical and economic efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance tasks based on current state of technology 6. to participate in the technical aspects of contracts and procurement process and manage the performance of the contractors 7. to communicate to all necessary partners such as staff, contractors, customers and suppliers 8. to use their technical/engineering knowledge and the organizational tools to improve maintenance tasks and plant efficiency in terms of availability and reliability 9. to fulfil organizational and economical obligations in the field of his undertaken tasks Project management skills are connected at least with competencies 1, 3, 5, 8 and 9, and communication skills with 1, 2, 7 and 8. Engineering students do get basic knowledge within project management and communication, but specific knowledge within the specific issues regarding maintenance to a lower extent. From this perspective, the education system is not at all prepared. Maybe this is not a big problem after all; an engineering program of 3-5 years cannot cover everything. Instead, we should maybe promote specializations or at least offer courses that are not only teaching basic reliability and maintenance engineering. If individual universities do not have the competence THE COMPETENCIES OF THE FUTURE and resources to do so, a viable solution is to “share” courses, for instance through distance-based alternatives. Other options are to collaborate more between higher education and vocal education, for instance by mixed courses, where the student after successful participation also can achieve higher education credit points. There are several such initiatives in Sweden within many topics (e.g. Expertkompetens, founded by the Knowledge foundation), but not just focusing on maintenance, reliability and asset management at the moment. IN FINLAND, THERE HAS BEEN DISCUSSION ABOUT STUDENTS' maths skills not being as strong as some years ago (Pisa tests). What is the situation in Sweden – Is there a risk that weakening math skills will reflect in future technical skills? Sweden had a downward trend in the Pisa tests until 2012, but now the trend in moving up again. It is a bit too early to say whether the upward trend will continue I guess, but the discussion about math and language skills has been ongoing in Sweden as well. The typical discussion on university level is that students have poorer math competencies today compared to 30-40 years ago. It seems like the skills are more diverse today; they differ depending on which school the student has gone to. Also, the Swedish students are poorer at formal maths, and therefore the gap between upper secondary school and university is quite large. If the deficiencies on basic school level are corrected (and that is happening today), then the risk would not be too high. If not, then it becomes a pedagogic problem at university level, i.e., to bridge the gaps and deficiencies, or the drop off from engineering education programs will continue being high as the students will not reach the objectives of the curriculum. The drop off is quite high today already, and that would not be a good thing. 50 maintworld 4/<strong>2020</strong>
VIBRATION ANALYSIS THERMAL IMAGING ULTRASOUND MEASUREMENT eyesight – hearing – sensitivity we have in common MASTER THE LANGUAGE OF YOUR MACHINERY WWW.ADASH.COM
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