Talk:Technician

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Who came up with this wacked definition of technician? It must be the result of union terminology since nearly every person who works in production and manufacturing has a technician title. Even the most simple jobs such as loading a part into a fixture and pressing a button has now become a technician. Even the usual assembly positions have now been given technician titles.

Pretty pathetic considering a technician was originally the term used for someone who has detailed knowledge and skills needed to work in various service fields. Dve —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dve (talk • contribs) 13:27, 13 September 2005

Agreed - It needs looking at. In particular I'd like to pop on a bit about the difference between a Technician and Engineer, but Im having trouble finding a reference for it (I should have made more notes when I went to the IEE development do). Lkchild —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lkchild (talk • contribs) 03:00, 1 May 2006

When I was a student, a couple of Engineering lecturers stated that an engineer is basically a technician with an additional awareness of the social, commercial, and legal aspects of his fields. Having been in the industry, I think there is definitely a difference even on the "core" technical matters: an engineer has more pure science, more mathematical abstract understanding of the technical side, while technicians are very hands-on lower-level understanding and more apt in industrial technical communications. For instance in an electricity power company, an engineer will be able to do loadflow analysis, fault calculations, do a conceptual design of a remote-controlled air break switch controller system. A technician will not know the maths to do such, but he will be able to do a more detailed design of DC-power supply system including switchboards specified to industry standards (something that an engineer may only be vaguely aware of), and he is able to draw standardized drawings by hand if necessary.

In terms of semi-technically related skills, a technician usually has difficulties understanding attempts of describing his/her own fields of expert by non-technical background people, which may be conveyed in technically incorrect terms or non-technical terminologies. He will probably also have more difficulties of not resorting to jargons when explaining his works. In contrast, an engineer usually has a greater ability to comprehend non-technical persons' (sometimes incorrect, but often described with elementary science) coinings of the technical stuff, and is able (some world say required) to gauge any of his communications to the backgrounds of audience. For instance, it is more difficult for a technician to explain the difference between the RS-232 and RS-485 protocols in data communications to his accountant-background manager than an engineer. (Not sure if this could be added to the main article, as this is my personal experience and we may need literatures to confirm) --JNZ 09:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)