Engineer to Software Engineer - A Practical Retraining Approach

Abstract The increasing availability of in-house mini-computer power encouraged a local manufacturinq company to consider the use of such equipment to aid their engineering processes, retaining the link to the remote parent company's computer installation for its data processing requirements. The introduction of such equipment immediately provided a resource which if managed carefully could result in some very valuable software being produced for the company, but if mismanaged could produce many virtually useless, very labour intensive, one-off programs which were only of benefit to the programmer. Since none of the engineers had been trained in software it was decided to undertake a rigorous training programme in conjunction with Chelmer-Essex Institute. This paper describes the case study outlined above placing emphasis on the training design process and the general strategies and models used to effect this training programme.