CEP1 Hypothesis, panel discussion and interview questions Section ___

Summary
What kind of audience/people are you required to communicate with in your job scope? Are they mainly engineers?
For Mr. Sim, his work takes place on a cargo vessel carrying liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). All the personnel on board (his colleagues) are all seamen that
have undergone training and are equipped with the relevant technical and seafaring knowledge. They are essentially all engineers on board the ship and are
required to work together to solve problems. There are two individuals in charge of the operations on board, the chief officer and the chief engineer, with other
designations such as captain and cadet, which are lower on the hierarchical structure on the ship.

How do you adjust your communication style when you are required to interact with those who do not have relevant technical contextual knowledge?
As many of the people on board the ship are technical-trained, technical terms are commonplace within the vessel. However, Mr. Sim notes that less
technical terms are used when communicating with the chief officer, who is in charge of the manpower of the seamen, and are instead used when
communicating with the chief engineer, whose role is to pinpoint any problems encountered, and determine how to solve it. The chief officer is then notified who
will then dispatch the orders and assigning the relevant crew to resolve the issue.

What about with other employees who are not proficient in English? Is there any difficulty in communicating with them in their language especially with technical
terms?
Among the ship’s crew, there are many individuals from different countries and have their own language. There are certain unique terms for shipboard
lingo that have become a universal language for the crew that allow them to communicate with each other. A language barrier still exists amongst the crew
members, and this can make it difficult to resolve certain issues. This is reflected in the example brought up by Mr. Sim where the ballast of the ship was not
working as intended, together with a Vietnamese crew member, Mr. Sim was assigned to resolve the situation. However, there was difficulty in communicating
the instructions from the chief engineer and Mr. Sim was required to draw the instructions out in diagram form to explain it to his fellow seaman.

How relevant do you consider the technical knowledge you learnt in school to be in your current occupation?
He feels that what he was taught in school is only applicable to a portion of his current occupation. The things he learnt in school are not totally used in
the working world, and in the workplace, further training is required. If a circuit is dead, no matter how it works, it still goes back to the fundamentals of current
flow. For example, when he went to Thailand for work, he had to solve a problem on the vessel that was not in his job scope - fixing a broken transformer.
Applying his knowledge of electrical circuits, he replaced the transformer and fixed the relevant electrical connections using electrical circuit fundamentals.

Do you think what you’ve learnt in school will be more or less relevant in the future?
In the future, what he learns in school will be more relevant, as the fundamentals of engineering, especially for electrical engineering, will remain the
same. In his undergrad years, concepts were taught broadly, and gave him a wide range of expertise for him to apply to various tasks.
CEP1 Hypothesis, panel discussion and interview questions Section ___
Do you think you will have to upgrade your knowledge through courses or further education in the future?
In the future, he does not know how the engineering world will change in the future, so upgrading himself is a must even though he possesses a degree.

Do you think there are any skills or knowledge apart from technical knowledge that should be included in the engineering curriculum?
He believes that communication skills are important, and thinks that one big problem engineers face is that they don’t know how to communicate well
with co-workers and colleagues. As engineers, being technical people is not enough, and communicating so that one can get the idea across is just as important
as being technically proficient.

What do you think is the next biggest engineering problem to solve in the maritime industry or in general? And how do you think solving this problem will shape
the future of Singapore?
In the shipping industry, especially with regards to level gauging, Mr. Sim feels that level gauging has been using the same technology for a long period of
time. However, this old technology sometimes give inaccurate level readings and, thus, Mr. Sim feels that this level gauging system should be upgraded with the
relevant technologies both in software and hardware.

With the prevalence of sustainable development in almost each industry, how do you think engineers’ role will change in the future? (Will engineering be more
important or less relevant in the future)
Mr. Sim feels that engineering will be more important in the future The reasons being: engineers are needed as long as there are systems to maintain.
Furthermore, engineering is a skill set that not everybody has and “you cannot ask a banker to do an engineering job”. With regards to Singapore universities
opening up more slots for engineering, Mr. Sim feels that it is good that these universities provide the avenue for more people to study engineering. However, he
believes that whether or not these students will pursue an engineering career eventually really depends on their own true passion at the end of the day.

Is there any particular field of engineering you think will be more popular than the other in the future?
Taking a broader view of the engineering landscape in Singapore, Mr. Sim feels that biomedical engineering in particular will be more popular in the
future.