Essential Skills That Every Aspiring Industrial Engineer Should Develop

Industrial & Manufacturing Blog

You are almost done with your internship and begin to wonder whether you are ready for your first job as an industrial engineer. Imagining that you are a dependable worker based on your performance during an internship is not enough. Additionally, when hiring industrial engineers, companies tend to look beyond academic achievement. Therefore, it is vital for you to foster some essential skills to facilitate your job-hunting efforts. This article highlights skills that will ensure you have a competitive edge over other aspiring industrial engineers.

Methods Improvement Skills -- Due to the nature of their jobs, industrial engineers take a systematic approach when dealing with various aspects of projects, which includes people, materials and industry-specific technology. However, since industrial engineers primarily answer design and engineering questions, the traditional approach does little to improve processes and procedures. In this regard, method-improvement skills have become sought after in the industrial engineering segment. Method-improvement skills will sharpen your ability to tweak processes and methods to come up with unique solutions to problems.

Technical Writing Skills -- Most industrial engineers are considered to be technical personnel. The downside of their technical and analytical abilities is that their reporting tends to be too complicated for the layperson. If your reports cannot be understood, then your career progression will stall at some point. To get around this challenge, therefore, it is critical to developing technical writing skills to make your reports more end-user oriented. With excellent technical writing skills, your reports, ideas and recommendations will pass all levels of management without skimping on logic or grammar.

Cross-Functional Team Skills -- Traditionally, industrial engineers used to work in isolation. They would come up with ideas and solutions which they would then pass to the shop personnel. The downside of this strategy is that once a defect was detected on the floor of the shop, the production process had to stop. The product would then be sent back to the engineers for inspection, and only when the defect was corrected would the production line resume. Companies have adopted cross-functional teams to eliminate any time wasting. In this case, industrial engineers are required to work with other departments in the organisation as a team. For example, an industrial engineer with cross-functional team skills should be able to make rounds along the production line. If there is a defect, the problem can be taken care of immediately, thereby saving time.

9 May 2018