Application Corner: Use it or lose it

You may have heard the expression "use it or lose it" where you essentially become rusty if you do not use a skill set or knowledge. This applies to personal, physical, professional and other activities. The farther we get away from doing something, the cloudier it becomes. We can mitigate this by periodically using these skills, but our professional lives may have taken turns that make periodic usage useless.

For example, you may have been knowledgeable about all kinds of electrical circuits when you received your engineering degree. When issues concerning electrical circuits surface years later, you might find yourself struggling to remember what you originally knew well. The basics will likely come back, but the details may have to be rediscovered.

On a side note, it is highly recommended that all engineers, regardless of discipline or anticipated career path, take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam in their last year of college or shortly thereafter. This is because the general knowledge across disciplines acquired in academia slips away quickly when concentrating on the personal skills and technology applicable to employment. If you doubt this, have you solved any differential equations lately? How about partial differential equations? If you are an electrical engineer, when was the last time you did a Bode plot or LaPlace transform? You get the idea.

You might be wondering how this is related to instrumentation and control, and flow measurement, in particular. Instrumentation engineers in the process industries design and install instruments in hazardous locations on a regular basis. They know the details about which instruments can be used and how they need to be installed. Consultants who have gotten away from this for a while… not so much.