Where should Maintenance Engineers come from?

Where should all maintenance engineers, HTDs etc come from?

More than a third of all engineers work in the maintenance profession. This while there is no formal training for it. As a result, there has been a huge shortage of people who can fill managerial positions in maintenance. Among maintenance engineers, this is most visible, but it also applies to heads of TD, work planners , project engineers etc. And the "grey wave" is still in full swing, so the shortage will only get worse.

That shortage also has a number of causes:

  • Natural continued growth within maintenance is drying up, partly because TDs are getting smaller and smaller;
  • The demands on management are going up very quickly: more and more places require an HBO education because of the increased demands on maintenance;
  • There is too little new intake from (full-time) HBO, because the required courses are not available. There are post-MBO programmes, but they are fishing in a pond where there is too little.

The board of KIVI-Maintenance believes it is necessary for more HBO graduates to have a profile that better matches the requirements of the field, and has therefore drawn up a proposal to this end.

That proposal broadly contains the following:

  1. It involves three different "profiles"
    1. Maintenance: mostly line functions such as head of TD, foreman TD, planner/work planner in maintenance, troubleshooter;
    2. Engineering: mostly staff positions ("maintenance engineer") with the tasks of drawing up the maintenance plan (= maintenance concept), troubleshooter, making analyses within maintenance, designing reports and analysis systems, functional design;
    3. Projects: "project engineer" whose tasks include management of projects, conversion and maintenance stops, testing and start-up, transfer between maintenance and production.
  2. This cannot be a new course, but it will have to take place in a collaboration between Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Engineering Management.

In HBO terms:

  • It may not become a design study;
  • The former AOT course cannot be taken off the shelf because it does not meet the now
  • set requirements;
  • It must be more than a "minor";
  • It must include subjects from all three mentioned directions;
  • This form is still fairly new within HBO, so that makes acceptance and introduction more difficult.
  1. It is essential that those who graduate in this know what practice "feels like". So they must have done things like disassemble and reassemble a pump, rebuild a piece of a control cabinet, etc. with their own hands during the course, including testing afterwards.

The project proposal has since been presented to the HBOs and is getting positive response.

Contact person within the board:

Dr.Ir.Arend Bos, info@mmcbv.nl