Are you worried that your ECSA registration application may be rejected because you have little to no design experience? Now what if I told you that it is still possible to become ECSA registered even if you have little to zero design experience.
I had a conversation with a candidate the other day and he was concerned that he could not become ECSA registered because his primary role was to perform maintenance on a large mining plant. I also learnt that the most complex design work that he completed was the replacement of existing piping due to corrosion on the plant.
At this point he started to share that he didn’t feel like his experience was adequate and you may agree that this experience does not seem that complicated on the surface.
Now what if we changed the angle of attack to focus on how we developed a solution for the problem rather than just say, “we changed the existing piping on the plant.”.
Now you might be saying, “Michael how does this change anything, there is nothing complex about changing some piping on a site?”
Well here’s the thing, many candidates believe that outcome 2 is all about performing some super complex design like a new system or a spaceship that will get us to Mars in the next 24 hours. If you go through ECSA documents, the heading for outcome 2 is to design / develop solution to an engineering problem.
So let’s look at the second part of the sentence “develop a solution to an engineering problem? Going back to the good old days of varsity, we learnt that the development of a solution is a process.
We developed several conceptual designs, we then looked at the pros and cons as well as how each concept met the requirements. The concept which met the most requirements and had the most advantages was further developed.
The same process can be used to demonstrate outcome 2 for ECSA requirements.
Let’s say that we have stainless steel and carbon fibre as the top two candidates as a suitable corrosion resistance type of pipe. We can include the following comparison in our reports.
- We can discuss how we went about selecting the pipe sizes for each section of the system, while ensuring that we maintained acceptable velocity and pressure loss values.
- We can compare fluid pressure loss of each material and describe how it impacts energy consumption of the system.
- We can evaluate the performance of existing components and determine what needs to be replaced.
- We can compare easy of manufacture, ease of installation and ease of replacement to minimise any down time of the system.
- We can compare capital cost versus expected operating life of each material as to indicate the return of investment of each selection.
Now wouldn’t you agree that these 5 points are showing how we compared and developed the best solution for this problem? Would you say that we have taken something that seems simple on the surface and made it into something that ECSA view as complex in nature?
After presenting this to the candidate, we started to work together where the goal was to align his work experience with ECSA 11 outcomes and to turn something that is simple on the surface into something that is complex that ECSA deem as acceptable.
If you are someone who is also struggling to align your work experience with ECSA 11 outcomes, click here to book your FREE one hour strategy session.
See you on the strategy call session
Michael Young (Pr.Eng)