Supervise engineering or other technical personnel
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The reporting and paperwork around management automate well. Directing, developing and evaluating people does not, and people do not accept it when it is attempted on them.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Managing, training and developing people |
| Jobs that do it | 20 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Enterprise platforms |
| O*NET activity | Guiding, Directing, and Motivating Subordinates (4.A.4.b.4) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 20 occupations that perform it.
- Monitor the work of specialists, such as electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, interior designers, or sound specialists to ensure optimal form or function of designs or final structures.
- Manage the work of subcontractors to ensure quality control.
- Manage teams of engineers by creating schedules, tracking inventory, creating or using budgets, or overseeing contract obligations or deadlines.
- Provide technical direction or supervision to junior engineers, engineering or computer-aided design (CAD) technicians, or other technical personnel.
- Direct technicians, engineering designers or other technical support personnel as needed.
- Supervise or train project team members, as necessary.
- Direct workers engaged in product measurement, inspection, and testing activities to ensure quality control and reliability.
- Supervise other engineers and crew members and train them for routine and emergency duties.
- Supervise the work of technologists, technicians, and other engineers and scientists.
- Supervise, train, and evaluate technicians, technologists, survey personnel, engineers, scientists or other mine personnel.
- Assign work to staff to obtain maximum utilization of personnel.
- Oversee the work of contractors in accordance with project requirements.
- Supervise technologists, technicians, or other engineers.
- Supervise technologists or technicians engaged in nanotechnology research or production.
- Supervise and train other technologists, technicians, and drafters.
- Supervise and coordinate work activities of workers engaged in drafting, designing layouts, assembling, or testing printed circuit boards.
- Supervise and train other drafters, technologists, and technicians.
- Supervise or direct the work of non-destructive testing trainees or staff.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing. The reporting and paperwork around management run on whatever you already use for documents, and the part that is actually managing people does not automate at any price.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Enterprise platforms
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
20 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Architects, Except Landscape and Naval
- Architectural and Civil Drafters
- Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers
- Computer Hardware Engineers
- Electrical and Electronics Drafters
- Electrical Engineers
- Industrial Engineers
- Landscape Architects
- Marine Engineers and Naval Architects
- Materials Engineers
- Mechanical Drafters
- Mechatronics Engineers
- Mining and Geological Engineers, Including Mining Safety Engineers
- Nanosystems Engineers
- Non-Destructive Testing Specialists
- Petroleum Engineers
- Robotics Engineers
- Surveying and Mapping Technicians
- Traffic Technicians
- Water/Wastewater Engineers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Supervise personnel activities”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.