Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The New Chapter: My Review of Happy Holden’s ‘24 Essential Skills for Engineers’

Happy Holden has been an inspiration to me since I first met him at IPC APEX EXPO a few years ago. He is the father of the modern-day HDI PCB and former CTO at Foxconn. In his book, 24 Essentials Skills for Engineers, Happy highlights the most important and viable skills for an engineer’s success. These skills and traits are ones he saw most frequently throughout his career. They matter for an engineer, no matter where they’re at in their career, from a new hire to a project manager, and I’m excited to review the ones that have resonated with me the most.

The Skill of Continuous Improvement
The first skill I want to highlight is knowledge of TQC, Six Sigma, and statistical tools. Happy argues that the TQC model and statistical analysis tools stand as a foundation for the modern engineer’s skill set. Continuous improvement as expressed through a TQC model should be at the forefront of every engineer’s mind. The TQC’s model is to “continuously improve processes by incorporating the knowledge and experiences of workers,” he writes. Two of TQC’s most important factors include process improvement and employee empowerment, which arguably go hand in hand.

When employees feel like they play a role in their organization, they are more likely to contribute to the success of that organization. On my team, we hold continuous improvements meetings for processes that may affect the way we collect data and prevent errors occurring in measurements. Happy writes brilliantly, “Mistakes may be made by people, but most of them are caused, or at least permitted, by faulty systems and processes. This means that the root cause of such mistakes can be identified and eliminated, and repetition can be prevented by changing the process.”

Through our team meetings on continuous improvement, we not only prevent mistakes from occurring in measurements, but we prevent repetition of the same mistake. However, this doesn’t just happen through a team meeting. Documentation and effective communication with your team helps ensure that the entire team is up to date as to where the problem stands. If the issue occurs again, then anyone on the team should be able to solve it, because we have good documentation.

Designing for manufacturing and assembly is a skill I’m working on at Texas Instruments. My team has a continual need to improve bench measurements, and I was asked to design the PCBs. In high school, I learned just how important designing a PCB is to understanding key concepts in electrical engineering, though I didn’t fully understand that, when designing a PCB, it is important to account for manufacturing and assembly constraints for possible rework. Rework is sometimes inevitable when designing for multiple use cases, even with team review. When designing for manufacturing and assembly, team reviews will help to ensure that reliable manufacturing is possible to increase product yield.

The Skill of Technical Writing
When Happy brought up technical writing as an important skill set for any engineer, I was ecstatic. In college, I was drawn to technical writing and learned that clear communication can directly impact the value of your work. Happy stresses that when writing a technical document, you must know your audience because it helps the level of depth that a technical document is trying to express. For example, if you are writing an instruction manual for a new hire to understand, please cut out acronyms. A new hire barely understands the depth of their work, let alone company acronyms. Understanding the technical document’s audience alleviates questions that may be asked later, such as with a datasheet.

Happy says technical writing is best when it’s straightforward, and opinion and bias are left at the door. Although leaving bias out of a document is difficult, practice makes perfect. It’s important to continually perfect your writing through peer review, he says, and having several reviews before publishing a paper not only helps the writer improve their skills, but gain a better understanding of where there may be missing links in the writing.

What stood out to me in this chapter was Happy’s detailed description of his process while writing any technical paper. Happy describes how he creates a mind-map for every paper, which leads to making a presentation. Then he presents his slides and uses text-to-speech to write his paper. I had never thought about creating slides based on my ideas for each paper, let alone do I rarely mind-map any concepts that will be used in the papers I write. I believe all these tips will help me organize my papers more effectively.

The Skill of Distance Learning
While reading through 24 Essential Skills for Engineers, some concepts genuinely surprised me, such as the skill of online instruction and the distance learning section. Happy talks about how this not only shapes the education of future engineers, but the way organizational training can be approached. When evaluating the benefits of distance learning, Happy includes equations as to why distance learning stands out. I thought this was incredibly interesting, because I had never thought about learning as having a computational curve to provide evidence for its benefit.

Conclusion
As I read through each essential skill, I learned more about topics I have yet to explore, such as Lean manufacturing and predictive engineering. For early engineers, our training is rigorous and thoroughly taught, but initial training cannot possibly teach every known concept in the industry, mostly due to the specificity of each job. Happy’s 24 key concepts help bridge that gap.

He does an excellent job of incorporating skills that would benefit any level of engineer. If he decides to add any chapters, I would love to see something on effective communication and the presentation of data. The stereotype for an engineer holds true: Engineers love data, but sometimes can struggle to effectively communicate to their team, whether that’s expressing a solution to a problem or presenting final data collection to their project teams. Another good chapter would be how to effectively lead meetings and keep a team on task, especially for someone interested in project management.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Thank you, Happy, for inspiring so many engineers. I’ll let you know how these skills help me progress.

This column originally appeared in the December 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine.