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Virtual Reality for Aerospace Maintenance Training- Chris Hall

Today we interview Chris Hall, a manufacturing engineer who migrated over to the training/education side of the aircraft engine manufacturing company he has been with for 20 years. We talk about how the design of aircraft engines has changed in the age of robust CAD/CAM software, and also how training technicians who maintain and repair the engines has changed with the advent of lightweight VR headsets and new methods of teaching.

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Show Notes

EPISODE TITLE: 6 – 3D Virtual Reality for Aerospace Maintenance Training- Chris Hall

EPISODE SUMMARY: 

Factory of the Future® is interviewing Chris Hall, an engineer with 20 years of experience in the Aerospace industry and leader of training workshops for new products and maintenance of old products. We talk about what’s different in the Aerospace design-build industry these days compared to any other time in the industry’s history. Also how advances in Augmented reality / Virtual reality are shaping product design and training of new engineers on familiarity with existing products. VR/AR is also being used to help field maintenance persons to get familiar with the various locations of parts they are responsible for maintaining and replacing.

“Traditionally it has been “come to us”. The products we make are very large and it’s not easy to move around. We have a training staff are probably around 30 or so for all of our range of products and sometimes we’ll go out onsite before they have our products and we’ll train the best we can. And typically it’s with PowerPoint slides and animations. We have some game designers that have come and worked for us.

Real-time Production Data displayed as an overlay to a machine/processing cell on the shop floor. Credit: uk.gov/eit-ampli

About Chris Hall: 

In an industry that is constantly gazing to the skies, Chris helps keep the new engineers and maintenance people grounded in reality while using the latest teaching methods.  Lead maintenance instructor for GTF engines at a Fortune 300 Aerospace manufacturer with two decades’ experience in commercial turbofan engines provides a unique perspective on both where the industry came from and where it’s going. Chris has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union for Science and Art, and a Masters of Science (M.S.), in Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical Engineering from Penn State University. He also volunteers his time at the Institute for Advanced Media training and is the area President of the local Toast Masters Club.

Transcript

Chris Hall – Aerospace Engineer

EPISODE 12 – 3d Virtual Reality Training in Aerospace Maintenance

3D Virtual Reality for Aerospace Maintenance – Chris Hall

[00:00:26] Mitch: Welcome once again, to another episode of Factory of the Future®.org podcast. I’m Mitch Kennedy co-founder of FactoryoftheFuture®.org. And with me in the studio, today is Chris Hall. Welcome, Chris. Hey, thank you. 

Mitch: I know you’ve been in manufacturing for a while and done a number of different things. I wonder if you could tell our audience, your origin story of how you became interested in getting into manufacturing.

[00:00:48] Chris: It’s funny. I just fell into it. So, if I go back to when I was 17 years old, I’m in high school, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do for college. And I have no idea. And I have a father that my father used to have gone to college for engineering, and my brother was going to college for engineering.

[00:01:06] Chris: So it was like the default go for engineering and I didn’t know much about it, but eventually after I got my degree, I ended up working for a large manufacturer. I never thought of myself as working in the manufacturing field. I certainly worked for a large manufacturer.

[00:01:23] Chris: Working on engineering, on products that were being manufactured partially in our company and partially through outsourcing and all that. But here I am 20 years later still working in that same company in that same field. Yeah. But the reason why I say that I don’t, sometimes I don’t feel that I’m in manufacturing is because I worked behind a desk most of the time.

[00:01:45] Chris: Engineers nowadays. You get your desk, you get your computer, parts on your screen.

[00:01:52] Chris: Those parts are typically about three times the size of the part that if it’s already manufactured, I’ve seen that this tends to be a rule of thumb for the stuff that we work on. And it’s funny, if you think about what engineering was, say a hundred, 150 years ago, those engineers were tradesmen that worked on machines, making the parts that they were designing.

[00:02:16] Chris: And nowadays it’s so removed where the engineers are so far removed from that the actual chip grinding or turning or milling, or what have you.

[00:02:24] Mitch: You could even, you can probably just send the drawings to a machine and the machine could do it and there may not be anybody there. 

[00:02:32] Chris: yeah. Yeah. The closest I ever got to that was I was working on lathe programming.

[00:02:38] Chris: So you’ve got these leads, they turn and you take off the material and. I was given the assignment. One of the machinists was they had an extra process afterward where they had to blend out a little step in the part after they turned it. I didn’t go anywhere near the machine.

[00:02:56] Chris: I was given software. I looked at the software, so they didn’t ground out the part in between the two operations. And so I said, all right, we’ll just program it to Zero-out the part between the two operations, they were fine, but and it’s amazing how involved I am with manufacturing, but not really as well.

[00:03:14] Mitch: Just for a little bit of background Chris works at a multinational company that shall remain nameless to protect the innocent as they say. But they are in a large range of consumer and government products and the places where he’s doing work these days, are very highly technical.

[00:03:31] Mitch: So I hope we’ll be able to talk about that at some point, too. So you got your degree in engineering, you got your job as an engineer, right? Yeah. And then how did things progress from there? 

[00:03:41] Chris: It’s funny for, so as I mentioned, 17 years not sure what I wanted to do with my life. And quite frankly, I don’t think engineering was that great, a fit for me.

[00:03:50] Chris: I’m very fortunate to have worked for a very large company with lots of places to work in. So every two years or so, I would bounce to a different position. Still in the same company, but in different positions. Then eventually probably about 15 years into doing this, I was very frustrated with my current assignment at the time. And I sat down with myself. I had three weeks off straight, which I never have, and I just took it all off. And I sat down with myself. I said, okay, what do I want to do?

[00:04:19] Chris: It’s I know the engineering side, but I don’t enjoy it as much, but the engineering side pays. I can get a good job as engineering pays pretty well. But on the side, for the last say, five years before this moment I’ve been doing storyteller. I would go on stage to these storytelling shows and just go up and tell the story.

[00:04:42] Chris: I have the engineering background, which I can get paid for, but I don’t like it, but I have the storytelling background and the onstage performance background that I enjoy immensely, but it doesn’t pay.

[00:04:54] Chris: I just and so I realized that there is a training. With a company, we’re so large and we have so many customers that we want to train folks on the machines that we make. And so I transitioned from designing essentially machine parts to actually training about the entire machine for our customers, for our internal employees, and so forth.

[00:05:15] Mitch: That’s a brilliant move. 

Chris: Yeah. I think so. I’ve been enjoying my career for the last four years now. And I’ve been excelling in. Just because. I like what I do. I can leverage my past experiences on it and do get to travel. Probably about two, or three times a year. I’ll go to a customer’s onsite somewhere and I’ll give a couple of classes there.

[00:05:37] Mitch: So what is it that you train people on how to use software, you training people on how to use machines? Are you showing people how to use your products?

[00:05:47] Chris: There are two sides to it. One big part of it is maintenance training. So our products require a lot of in-the-field maintenance.

[00:05:55] Chris: And so we’ll train the mechanics. Okay. Go and do that. But then the other side of it is how. Then, our products work overall and it’s, and that’s mostly for internal employees. For the most part. A lot of our engineers will take that course as well as the lawyers and the human resources, professionals and all that because they join our company and to this field and they don’t really know much about our products.

[00:06:20] Chris: And it’s funny, even when I was an engineer, I knew my part of it, like a. I started out as an acoustician. Our products are very noisy. And so I would analyze our products for noise and also develop computational routines to predict noise, and how noisy they were. That sounds very engineering, very much very technical.

[00:06:44] Chris: And so my job was really focused there for the first two years. And not about how the products work overall. I didn’t know anything about that. So someone showed me a blueprint or a F R I M no blueprint, but a subset of a blueprint, one point of one part of an, of at the end of the product that we’re analyzing.

[00:07:05] Chris: And I had no idea it was looking at, and it took me a couple of years before I could read a blueprint. It took me a number of years before I can look at a cross-section, and understand what I was looking at. Very complicated kind of stuff. But a lot of engineers nowadays are just focused on that. This is your one thing.

[00:07:22] Chris: This is when you want to look at this is what you know. So the courses I give now are meant to give those people a broader scope, broader scale of what we actually make. Big picture kind of thing. Yeah. Because if you don’t have that kind of context, it’s hard to make really intelligent decisions about design and stuff.

[00:07:41] Mitch: Exactly. You’re designing in a box. Basically. 

[00:07:44] Chris: I wish I had that experience. Much earlier on in my career how our parts were made, and how they’re used in the field. Just the old experience from them and just learning from that’s something that’s sorely lacking for the new engineers coming up.

[00:08:00] Mitch: Because we talk about The skills gap, but that usually refers to job vacancies, but there’s all that institutional knowledge that went with the people who had to do things the first time you’ve ever made one of those things, as opposed to letting us just improve the iteration, 

[00:08:15] Chris: Yeah. And it seems companies may go through generational changes. I’ve always been told when I started in aerospace engineering my father said, oh, I dunno if you want to do that because it’s an 11-year boom-bust cycle. Oh, you got good years but then every 11 years there are rounds of layoffs and that’s where traditionally the aerospace industry loses.

[00:08:38] Chris: It’s, I think that’s changed but what you’ll see is from those earlier days, you would have generations of engineers of a certain age. And then from a certain age, there’d be very few of them because they were all laid off back in the day. Oh, wow. I can give a good example of that. This was about 10, 12 years ago.

[00:08:59] Chris: I was working with an older engineer and he said, man, I’m trying to find. Set my wife’s girlfriend up with a guy who has gotta be about 40 years old. And there are only two 40-year-old guys at this point because that was the age. When back in the nineties, there were a lot of layoffs.

[00:09:16] Chris: And and so you’ll see that you might see companies going through waves of hiring because of the older generation. Retire or what have you ever, and there’s a danger in that. I see that the knowledge doesn’t get passed. Yeah. We’re also, you’ve got all these new young engineers that don’t have the history.

[00:09:35] Chris: They know the theory, they can tell you what the force is going to be in an object or what the stress is going to be. But they’re not going to tell you, be able to tell you why don’t we use floridated silicone in a certain product. Because they don’t know of that older product having bad issues.

[00:09:52] Mitch: Wow,That’s cool. I’m very interested in industrial history as a general topic.

[00:09:56] Chris: But so I’m hoping with what I’m doing now, the training, is that I can give a little bit of that context and knowledge so that people can to design things, to manufacturer things a little more intelligently, intelligent manufacturing.

[00:10:08] Mitch: Yes, absolutely. Wow. So now you’re doing training and you’ll love it. And as you’re going around to different facilities and training different people, you probably get to see the facilities in different stages of technological advance. There are probably certain factories that get to try out the new technologies and other factories are held back or said, you get to try it out after we proved it over here. That kind of thing.

[00:10:38] Chris: My experience with that has been we’re designing a new product with a whole bunch of new hardware in it, new part numbers, new parts and we’re going to go. I see what we can do to try out the process, but mostly it’s done at suppliers nowadays. I’m at a company that’s large enough where I’ve seen over the course of my 20-year career manufacturing processes actually being taken out and being farmed out to, to next to your suppliers and all that.

[00:11:07] Chris: And so it’s funny that the brand new processes, I don’t really get. But the closest I’ve done is we may not have the actual labor D being done on-site, but we have the design responsibility. We have the quality responsibility when everything comes through getting assembled it, the final product.

[00:11:25] Chris: Because that’s very critical. And because we’re a large company, we, we’ve got it into the. Quality initiatives that many large companies will have to refer to the towed away method, with Kaiser plans and so forth. We’ve gotten into that. We have our own flavor of that.

[00:11:42] Chris: And but we’re working with lower-tier suppliers that are small enough that they don’t really have the resources to develop that. And we’ll help them, we’ll train them. And now I don’t take part in that training, but I’ve been part of the second wave of folks that will come in and do the audit of them to make sure they’re ready to get on board with the manufacturing quality.

[00:12:04] Chris: So it’s not so much the new techniques that we’re learning or that we’re seeing, or the new processes we’ll leave that to those experts. Suppliers, but we’re trying to bring our quality system and export that to our supplier base. And so I’ve been part of that. 

[00:12:21] Mitch: Are you using like you, obviously, you’re not the only trainer I would guess for this organization, and yo can’t be everywhere. So are you doing a lot of remote training or do you actually really need to be onsite the old-school way?

[00:12:35] Chris: It’s funny it’s to the class for training technology. We’re trying to move ahead with that and develop new technology for there. Traditionally it has been “come to us.” We have our products we make that are very large and it’s not easy to move around.

[00:12:52] Chris: We’ll do some onsite training with our products, but for the most part, it’s our customers coming in before they receive our hardware and they’ll train on our training hardware. And so we’re seeing. Yeah, with them coming to us and we’ll have remote sites. We’ll have we’re located in four or five different locations around the world.

[00:13:12] Chris: We have a training staff of probably around 30 or so for all of our range of products and sometimes we’ll go out onsite before they have our products and we’ll train the best we can. And typically it’s with PowerPoint slides and animations. We have some game designers that have come and worked for us.

[00:13:29] Chris: They make nice, wonderful graphic escalations, which is cool. But now we’re trying to get to the next wave, which is going to be virtual reality. And so there’s a lot of talk about virtual reality and training whether it is an immersive kind of stuff goggles, Google glass type of things, Oculus kind of things.

[00:13:47] Chris: But basically the idea would be, and honestly, I think the industry has not figured out how to do this yet, but the idea would be to have your product, either your product virtually in front of you or the product in front of you, but additional information. Tacked on top of it, like augmented reality, crib notes, or something, say, you’ve got your machine in front of you.

[00:14:09] Chris: You want to maintain it. You put on some goggles and you’ll see the machine, but also next to it will load up your maintenance procedures. So they’re right there for you. And so you could train that way. You’ve got your training materials right there. So that you can follow along with what so we’re struggling with right now, ourselves to figure out how we’re going to use this.

[00:14:30] Chris: I’ve got I made a step. So we are we have in-house designers for this? We had the guy left, but we had an in-house designer that was doing this stuff as soon as like a video game engine kind of deal. And what you could do is put on a pair of goggles and you’re in a simulated training space with our hardware right there.

[00:14:51] Chris: And so I was curious, I had a class, I had them set it up just as just to show off, Hey, look what we’re doing. So you can tell your coworkers. And so the word gets out. Our company is being. And it was also like, wow, look at this and have them try it on like a little, a fun little event.

[00:15:11] Chris: But at one point I said, Hey, you have to see where each of the individual components are, so you can do the maintenance. So tell me where the fuel pump is pointing out. It’s all in front of you virtually the whole machine. Where’s the fuel pump for that? And the guy was able to, and his coworkers that came for training raw, helped him out.

[00:15:29] Chris: It’s not always over to the left, get up to the Miguel under they’re going to the that’s a good train. It’s funny. It’s funny to see them. It’s like a guy on a big floor with a Goggle on and a screen in front of you. You see what he’s seeing, but he’s going underneath it around the machine is not even there.

[00:15:44] Chris: It feels like you’re there. That’s amazing. And I saw this. This is a training opportunity, right? These people, these students, need to know where all the parts on the hardware is. I went to the programmer and I said, Hey, I’ve got this idea.

[00:15:58] Chris: Let’s do a Scavenger Hunt and I’ll divide my class. My class is usually around 15 people. I’ll divide them into three groups of five. And what we can do is each group will get around the computer. The one guy will put the Gog on everywhere else. So we’ll see what he sees on the screen and the product will be there. Yeah. And let’s go and do a scavenger hunt.

[00:16:16] Chris: There’ll be a list next to the product of 20 things. You have to find it. And time how long it takes you to find it. Cause you’re supposed to learn in my class, right? So let’s go show it and show me how much you’ve learned and the team that gets the lowest time to find this stuff Will get a prize.

[00:16:31] Chris: Everyone gets a prize and it’s very simple. It’s tacked on the end of my class. But it’s a little reinforcement, like a little quiz. And it’s a little competition-based so it gets people into it, even though, we do eight-day classes and it’s a long class.

[00:16:46] Chris: And so on the eighth day, everyone’s ready to go home. And so this is a nice little fun thing to do at the end of the day, but it shows. That, we, there is a practical use for this VR technology. And it’s, where it goes next. The managers, like the idea of AR augmented reality.

[00:17:04] Chris: You could see the product, but there’s there, but I’m trying to convince them, Hey, maybe we don’t have to have the folks, pay for travel to come to. My company and do the training. Maybe I can go take a couple of flight pieces, a couple of computers, and equipment and head out.

[00:17:20] Chris: Budapest or Ireland or Japan and set it up and I can train all those folks there and they could see the hardware and the product and all that and do the training there and be cool. And that would give us a huge amount of more flexibility for training. It’s, it’s just seeing, it’s exploring, Hey, this is cool technology we’re going to do with it.

[00:17:38] Chris: I don’t know yet, but right. And seeing how students interact with it and come up with ideas. 

[00:17:43] Mitch: That’s really cool. That’s kudos to you for inventing something to help students. That’s a great use of, I don’t 

[00:17:48] Chris: know, it’s an invention, but it’s innovation. It’s innovation. Yeah. So we’ll see where it goes next.

[00:17:54] Mitch: We talked about your background. We’re seg way into the role of technology in manufacturing and the internet of things. I usually ask people now, what is your, what are your thoughts on the acquisition of data, the pursuit of VR, or the pursuit of that totally connected factory? Do you have an opinion?

[00:18:15] Chris: Yeah, my company is getting into data just like a lot of tech companies are. So as I mentioned, our products are very complicated and require lots of maintenance. And so there is a large desire to reduce maintenance costs because it becomes very significant for the customer. So one way you can do it is by collecting lots and lots of data on the product and monitoring it.

[00:18:42] Chris: And we’ve been doing that for decades and decades in a limited scope. There’s only so much you can do, but nowadays it’s just just like Facebook is doing just like Google, Google’s doing it. We’re doing it too, but how are products being used? And we could see the entire.

[00:18:56] Chris: Operation cycle for our product from start to finish from the window, the woman with the switches flipped onto the moments it’s flipped off and the data comes to either the customer if they buy a subscription to it, or it comes to us and we can monitor it. And the good news about it is that we can find problems early if the machine is if the product is breaking down.

[00:19:18] Chris: Usually you have some time before you can catch that. And so you can save a lot of money by knowing that the parts breaking it’s like your car with the check engine light. Yeah. If you could see the check engine light, you can go bring your car. At your convenience to the auto shop, before you’re stuck on the side of the road, you have to call a tow truck and it costs so much more money and it’s a holiday weekend.

[00:19:40] Chris: Exactly. And so this is exactly what that’s going for. And so that’s goodness right now there’s another side of it too. Our customers there is there’s someone turning on and off that switch, there’s someone operating that product and they’re not exactly a. They may not be happy with being monitored in that fashion because there’s always a human element to how manufacturing products are used and whether or not, you could take your car, go back to the car example, check oil light didn’t comes on.

[00:20:11] Chris: That could be just wear and tear the car. Normally, maybe you’re driving like a maniac, and you’re wearing the brakes out or, you’re going from drive to reverse very quickly. And it’s Ooh, I’m in Dukes of Hazzard was yeah. And you’re really destroying your transmission.

[00:20:23] Chris: And more closer to the home way I can describe that is a lot of companies are doing this health monitoring. Oh yeah. And whether the wristband or the wristband and the data come in and you get bad influences on your health insurance premiums. Or your car insurance company will do that.

[00:20:39] Chris: But some people and myself included, it’s I don’t want to be monitored. And if I have my failings where I’m eating too many donuts, I don’t want my company to decide maybe I should be in the next round of layoffs or something like that, which is probably not gonna happen. But your conspiracy lead in mind will think about that.

[00:20:58] Chris: And if you monitor how our products are being used, it could be with a very worthwhile experience of saving us money and saving our customers money by looking for problems early on early fault detection. But it, I could see how our users, don’t want, to be judged.

[00:21:16] Mitch: We don’t wanna be judged.

[00:21:21] Chris: How I work is my private matter. And I don’t think anybody really has the solution yet. You’ve got Google and Facebook and the other big social platforms. They’re trying to work on that. And then you’ve got your company and many other multinationals that probably do the same thing.

[00:21:41] Mitch: One of the areas that we talk about on Factory of the Future®.org is the role of technology and its ability. to scale with different kinds of intents. So I’m very, very interested in what large multinational companies do. But like you said, sometimes you have to go into the supply chain and you’ve got to help them at the smaller plants because they don’t have the capital or the expertise and you need to get that deed out somehow. 

[00:22:12] Mitch: Let’s see. The other thing is from your perspective, as far as technology goes, what do you think is the most difficult thing to train people for? From a conceptual basis, in terms of new technology, 

[00:22:27] Chris: you’re talking about.

[00:22:27] Mitch: You’re in charge of doing training for people who don’t have any experience with the product. It’s a new product. They need to become more familiar with it. So there’s not that much different than putting you in front of new technology. Yeah. And having to learn it.

[00:22:41] Chris: Yeah. Honestly, my biggest challenge right now is not so much seeing from the student’s side it’s seeing from my side in terms of how to train, how to train it.

[00:23:14] Chris: They don’t know teaching methods. And so it’s a very non, like pedagogical kind of thing going on. When a, when I was an engineer, I would take these training classes designed for us, maybe like a one-day class, two-day classes. It was always someone talking in front of a PowerPoint and here are all the facts and that’s it.

[00:23:34] Chris: And my training classes have been large that we’re given for an eight-day class. It’s about 1000 slides and you’ll present 1000 slides over the course. No, there are some other hands-on tasks as well. And that’s about three days’ worth of material where you’re actually out on our floor with the product and actually doing, hands-on maintaining it, stripping it down, putting it back together.

[00:24:00] Chris: What I’m trying to see for myself is how do I turn this into more of a teaching experience, as opposed to just the training, and what I mean by that is our products will break down into. That’s a very expensive thing. And like I said, with the data, we try to detect that early. So you can, remove the product from the field and get it to be overhauled and fixed and a controlled manner in a more, more or less predictable.

[00:24:28] Chris: I see, and particularly the stuff that kills you. I want to do is train my students and the students that are from the customers, the folks that are the frontline, they’re maintaining the product in the field without any backup at first.

[00:24:41] Chris: I want them to be able to understand our products so much that they can intuitively say this is what I’m seeing. Maybe it’s that hardware, not this one that our procedures tell you to look at. It might be that one instead. No this is because I understand how the part where the product works.

[00:24:59] Chris: And so to do that, it’s not just giving the information. I want to try to give them more troubleshooting responsibility, a feeling of ownership and troubleshooting, and those skills. And so I’m hoping to get into more of a classroom type deal where I’m gonna give them projects and assignments they can solve these little things like as scenario-based kind of training. That 

[00:25:21] Mitch: sounds perfect. That’s, I think there’s a lot more education going towards actual education these days. Then there were the typical curricula of “this is how you learn.”

[00:25:32] Mitch: “You have to learn it this way.”

[00:25:33] Chris: And I don’t know how. The prevalent that had been thinking is to give you an example. After my first year of training, I met up with a friend from high school.

[00:25:45] Chris: She’s, now a fourth-grade teacher and she was telling me do you work with the central question? I’m like what? And she explained what the central questions me were. And what that is in your lesson, planning in your curriculum, you may want to engage students’ interests by presenting an essential question.

[00:26:06] Chris: Like for instance, your teaching history, you may want to pose the question. Why is War? And it’s an essential question because there’s no easy answer for that. There’s no way in a textbook. You can go really and get that it could be multiple answers. Each one of them may or may not be right.

[00:26:22] Chris: And it’s a question designed to engage the stimulate intellectual curiosity. And so I brought that idea back to my organization and the other trainers, that’s it that’s, that might be work that might be for kids, but we’re working with adults and they think differently and that’s true.

[00:26:42] Chris: Adults will learn differently from kids and you treat and you approach that differently. But I still think the idea of stimulating intellectual curiosity is a good thing because it drives people to want to learn about your product as opposed to having to be there. And trying to adjust a whole bunch of information that’s given to them.

[00:26:58] Mitch: And I think as you move forward, Years of training. You’re going to come into a whole another generation of people, who’ve grown up, being able to get access to any fact or figure they want. And so the regular mode of training just isn’t going to hold their interests. may not.

[00:27:16] Chris: Some people are coming quite motivated either their job is it is either their jobs going to be, to train other folks in their organizations. So they have skin in the game. Okay. As I said, they’re going to be working straight on the product and our product has, we sell to many customers, not all at the same time, so word gets around.

[00:27:36] Chris: And so they’ll know about our stuff before they get it, they’ll come to training with the pre presuppositions or understandings. 

[00:27:44] Mitch: If you were coaching or encouraging someone to get a career in manufacturing, how would they go about doing this?

[00:27:54] Mitch: Or if they want it to do what you do, what you think would be essential skills. They come into the job interview with 

[00:28:01] Chris: thing. All right. It’s funny. It’s like training is something that is more of a later career type of move. I’ve got, I’m just about to do 20. With my company and industry, not including the college years I had.

[00:28:14] Chris: And I wouldn’t have gotten the job with. Like two skills. One is the engineering background I had on our product for all those times. Since I’m teaching maintenance courses, they really were looking for a maintenance person. Oh, okay. To be able to teach, I had the technical background behind the product.

[00:28:30] Chris: What really sealed. As well as my ability to speak in front of people, the storytelling kind of stuff. I was able to I’m fearless in front of a crowd of folks. But if you wanted to get into there you would want to really understand what is.

[00:28:45] Chris: Because you’re the experts there. There’s no one coming back to there’s no one to go and come back to, you have to be independent on that. Although I do rely on my other instructors for their knowledge quite a bit, probably too much if you ask them. But but generally speaking, just getting into a manufacturing field to begin with I came from the engineering side.

[00:29:03] Chris: So obviously an engineering degree is going to be very important. I’m not exactly sure how not to get into engineering without a degree. But you could see jumps. There are folks that have come from the. Operations side where they were the machinists or they were the operator or the quality person and jumped over to the engineering side.

[00:29:22] Chris: So it’s discipline. It’s its spunk, right? It’s if you’re not doing it now, do you want to see the same box? You got the Moxy.

[00:29:27] Mitch: Chris, thank you so much for coming in and sitting down with me and talking about your life in engineering and in manufacturing. And I think you’ve done a great service to us today.

[00:29:42] Mitch: I appreciate it. Thank you all for listening. Tune again, tune in again next week for another episode of Factory of the Future®.org. Thank you. 

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