Glenn Michael Morley

RE-WIRING YOUR ENGINEERING BRAIN HARD DRIVE

the difficulty in being an design engineering analyst and a consultant at that - is the sheer number of engineering programs on the market these days - each company tends to have their own preference and as you move from contract to contract you are forced to either learn the new program or find another contract - worse still - in the engineering analysis work that I am most often involved - there are now multi-program suites - sort of like your MS Office suites - one for CAD - another for FEA finite element analysis - one for meshing - another for CFD computational fluid dynamics - another for post-processing and on it goes as no single program tends to offer the full complete package - the end result is that I have now learned well over 30+ engineering programs in design and analysis in my career to date - often the programs are relatively stable so that if you were working with it a few years back and upgrades occur the GUI and methodology have most often not altered too much so you are able to get back up to speed quite quickly - other times - the program completely alters its GUI and methodology so that a program you "knew quite well" a few years ago is suddenly a complete new program animal - of course if you suggest you know the program and then are suddenly confronted with this re-make it can provide for some challenges - the key however is to not focus on the program or GUI itself but the underlying principals of ALL such programs - solid modelling CAD is based on but a few fundamental principals so it should not matter which program you are using - surface modelling is the same but has more capability and complexity but often can be broken down to similar base principals - FEA is FEA regardless of what program is being used - if you profess to only know one FEA program then you do not know FEA at all !!! - CFD is the same and if you focus on the core principals of what these programs DO rather than on HOW they do it - you should be able to literally get on any program you have never worked with and soon be up to speed as if you are a seasoned expert - OK - easier said than done but that is most often the situation I find myself in repeatedly throughout my career - flexibility is key to being a consultant - my most recent work I was tossed into a completely new engineering suite and had to learn (6) programs at project pace without any training - scarce program manuals access and no one to ask questions - I did not panic - I just migrated - I took the core principals of similar programs I had used and looked for the GUI correlation - whether the button had now become Blue and changed its Name should (did) not matter - I knew that what I used to do before was now converted into a blue button with a different name - if you can re-wire your brain hard drive in this fashion you will quickly succeed to "learn" the new program on the fly - if you can drive a KIA you should be able to drive a Ford - driving an F1 car however IS different but still - a car is a CAR - throttle - brake - clutch - steering wheel - shifter ... done