Transferable Skills

(Courtesy keithparnell.com)

With many out of work or looking to find a better position, it is one of the busiest hiring periods in recent times. Those working in Human Resources (HR) know all too well that the sheer volume of resumes for just one position can reach well over one hundred resumes.  So in order to narrow the possibilities, the HR professionals word the job posting so that no one really has all the "minimum qualifications" that the hiring company is seeking to find.

Not to be overlooked are transferable skills.  Here are some of the common mistakes found in hiring and what fixes the issue:

• "No experience in our industry".  I was once told I didn't have any food industry experience for a manager's position at a local yogurt plant.  What I did have was many years experience in a manufacturing operation.  My experience was in a regulated industry (FAA) that is comparable to another regulated industry, food manufacturing (FDA).  So the skills I learned at Boeing (management, dealing with machines that go down, raw material issues, etc) are transferable to other manufacturing industries.  In fact an outsider may very well bring fresh new insight to the position.  In addition, the learning curve is not so steep that an experienced person can quickly get up to speed.
• "You aren't experienced in our 3D CAD system".  If you have had any training in one  3D CAD system, you can easily learn another.  The commands for doing operations are different but make sense once you get into the nuts and bolts of the CAD system.  In fact with many icon based programs like CATIA V5, all that is required is to know the icons.
• "You have never been a manager before".  Maybe not but every manager out  there was working at a staff level before being promoted.  They were not managers before either.  Many managers join a company with preconceived ideas on how things should be run in the new company.  Often it is better to take an inexperienced face and  mold that person into the leader your company deserves.

(courtesy:csuitementor.com)

Compatibility of 3D CAD Graphics Systems

The design and operations world has many options available to use in designing, manufacturing, and assembling a product or system.  These include CATIA, Unigraphics, ProE, Solidworks, AutoCad, and others. While all of these software packages have strengths and weaknesses, it is important to have a way of translating a 3D design from one system to another.

(Courtesy of images.frompo.com)

Hopefully, within an organization, a company is using one type of software (and the same version) when sharing a design back and forth between engineering and operations. It seems impossible that a company would use different types of software, but I have seen it done.  Obviously this creates problems right away and I would suggest that these types of companies don't have an idea what is going on.

The biggest challenge occurs when a company contracts out a design to another company and different software packages are used.  This happens quite often where different contractors win bids with different companies.  Rather than try to institute a new software (expensive and time consuming) the two partners use their in-house software packages.

To get different types of software packages to share designs, translation software is used.  Files are created and used to translate a CAD model from one software to the next.  In an ideal world this process should take no more than a couple of hours.

However, several things can go wrong.  First, the type of translation software may not have been tested accurately.  A computer or IT person may thing everything is good, but an engineer or operations person may find there are errors including the misfortune of an "unreadable model".

The conversion process may take several days which is clearly unacceptable in a fast paced industry with little buffer built into its schedule.  For delays in processing the translation many people usually have to help fix the problem, which pulls them away from other work.

Even in a normal design or manufacturing iteration, the amount of back and forth review and changing of models is time consuming and that may not be desirable in order to meet schedule.  For this reason alone, careful consideration must be given to what types of CAD packages are being used by your group and those you do business with.  It pays to work this our early on or you may pay dearly later delivering late products to market.

(Courtesy of www.plm.automation.siemens.com)