I’m an engineer but I have never done the kind of jobs people who are not engineers associate with engineers.
A few years back, I showed to my brother a help wanted ad asking for an “Organizational Engineer”, a degree which had just been approved by the Spanish Ministry of Education: the first degrees of that kind had not been printed yet. Bro’s reaction was “but what the heck kind of specialty is that? Organizing is what us engineers DO!”
Bro is a mechanical engineer. For many years he worked in a stone company. He’d go to a construction site, measure the places which needed stone laid on them, then draw plans for the stone layout, including the shape and size of the pieces; he supervised the people who laid out the stone and met with the construction firm to measure the finished work so they could bill for it. Nowadays he’s a construction site foreman: he coordinates the work of the different tradesfolk and meets with folk to verify their finished work so his employers can get billed.
I’m a chemical engineer. For the first few years of my career, I worked in research in the US: first in a university (well, I was aiming for a PhD in Chemistry - but left with an MSc), later in a pharmaceutical company. Then I came back to Spain; two years of temp jobs ranging from “assistant to the logistics manager” (contacting suppliers abroad for ETAs on shipments) to “lab tech”, eventually a job as “lab tech, weekend shift” from which I got promoted to what I do now: organizational consultant.
There’s this management philosphy called “ERP”, which basically amounts to “in order to plan your work properly, you need to take into account all the resources you use: materials, machinery, people, etc.” There’s these “ERP Databases”, used to store all the data needed to manage a company. There’s companies which want to use “an ERP (database)”, but installing one isn’t just a matter of downloading a program and clicking on “Install”; the program needs to be adapted to the needs of the company, people need to be trained… and that’s what I do.
It’s always as part of a team: we analyze our customer’s processes (which is very much an engineery thing), then look for the best way to reflect those processes in the database, at the same time working with the customer to improve the processes (again a very engineery thing). We prepare training materials and train people (or at least, train the trainers).
Example of an improvement: when my boss at the factory where I was a weekend lab tech called me to tell me we were going to be doing this, I asked “does this mean the warehouse manager will not be calling every 15 minutes asking ‘where is my fucking data?’ any more?” and she said “oh my… oh God, YES! This is going to be worth it if only for that!” That was a very simple improvement which stemmed from having a single management program rather than half a dozen of them, but it got the lab folk rid of their biggest irritation. Other times we’ve managed to go from a process involving five people in three different systems, to three people (from different departments) in the same system.