Prompt 8: Practicing Your Knowledge: Job-Shadow

By: Eric

In the past few years I went on two job shadows where I got to see what it is like working in the engineering field. One of the job-shadows I did what with Cary Sherrill, at the Ford Motor Company in the Body Construction Engineering Division. He is the Division Liaison Process Engineer. So, he helps and is responsible for establishing the process in which things are being made in the factory. When I was there at the time he was designing a process on putting together the passenger doors for the F150 Truck. Not physically putting them together but building a virtual model of how the door would be assembled. This was sort of like an assembly line of robots that put the parts of the door together (some of the things included 8 Robots, 2 Turntables, 3 Pedestal Rivet Guns…..). This design of how to assemble the door was done on the computer in Virtual Space software. Overall this job experience was similar to some the way the engineering field is represented. Coming in to work early in the morning every week day. Being in an office and sitting at a desk all day. Doing work on the computer and having lunch breaks with the people you work with. So, yes this some of the things said about this field are true. But that’s not true for all cases.

The other job-shadowing experience that I did was with my uncle, Larry Bernhardt. He Works for TSA-Technical Sales Associates and his job title is technical sales manager. His job is almost the exact opposite. All day we were basically in the car making phone calls and driving to other people’s factories. We never really sat down in an office or by a computer, instead it was more of being in the factory and making sure everyone was doing their job right and the orders/sales are being made on time and to the right people. 

This hands-on learning experience was different than learning from a written or/spoken source because you got to see and do what you would be doing in the field. You could experience the atmosphere of the work place and get a true understanding of what it is like. What this hands-on experience reveled to me is that not all jobs in the engineering filed are the same. I really depends on what your job is and the specific filed and focused in that field is. You could go to the more business side of engineering, could work on the computer using design software, or do more of the labor intensive work inside the factory. It all just depends on the specific field or focus is under the engineering field.