Continuous Learning Attitude in Engineering

By: Kurt Ansorge

The principles of continuous improvement are widely employed in industry as a means of ensuring the activities which a business undertakes are in line with meeting customer needs (both internal and external). Taking the principles of continuous learning and applying them to engineering processes and behavior is essential for maintaining the skill set and knowledge base required to execute engineering design and development programs in a cost efficient and effective manner.

At Mettle Ops, our engineering staff is continually learning through structured learning and computer-based training relevant to our fields of focus. Our attitude is to seek out and gain new understanding within our field, and in related fields, on a daily and weekly basis to ensure we are maximizing our effectiveness of executing programs in hand as well as positioning ourselves for improved job performance long term. We have members of the team in various courses ranging from online training through traditional college programs for engineering training.

At the company level, we maintain a database of existing programs and lessons learned to ensure we can act more effectively each time we approach a new, but similar, engineering challenge. Every job we perform is also a learning opportunity that must be taken advantage of while we are executing our work to our customers satisfaction. Approaching every task as not only a goal to be achieved, but also an opportunity to gain more understanding of general and specific engineering knowledge, is essential to maintain the attitude of continual learning.