Pro tips: Process Engineers

Pro tips exist to help you in your career. They usually focus on topics that I have experience with, but I had the pleasure of talking to an oil/gas process engineer recently with interns. He had some general advice, which I will paraphrase.

Learn your process

When he starts, his first month at work was documenting his entire process area. He was assigned to write an instruction manual of the system, complete with photos, which would allow him to improve the system later on.

This is very different than what I have seen in my field, where the plant engineers rarely troubleshoot systems and are more involved in the capital project work. It would be helpful, certainly, and I loved it!

Read your equipment manuals

Anything that involves reading a manual is guaranteed to get some positive feedback from me. Most of the time, I see people trying to troubleshoot systems by guessing and checking or just finding a sales rep who has a “solution” to their issue. Reading saves a lot of time.

Work both sides

This process engineer actually had some process control experience! It allows him to speak both “languages,” which is something I am ashamed to say that I have trouble with.

Fit in with the culture

This one is probably obvious, but it bears repeating. I work in the public sector, where mentoring helps decrease workloads and there is less competition. Our rule of thumb is that supervisors can fail, subordinates can only succeed. (Supervisors are responsible for their teams after all.)

His private sector work involved a fair bit of infighting and, at least once, someone else took credit for a massive improvement that he came up with. To me, this seems understandable but unpleasant.

Know your first principles

This was not from him, but rather from others training the interns. Engineers are expected to know their particular field well. You should be able to do basic tasks, or know where to find the answers, from the beginning. This means you should really keep spreadsheets or other tools ready for common tasks (aka pump sizing).

I am sure there would have been more, but we ran out of time to talk. I hope this helps someone out there!