Ethical Issues in my Profession:
As we visited China we were constantly viewing various work environments, be it in the cozy labs of Capital Bio, or the dusty stalls of the vendors on the streets. Compared to the United States, all wages are low especially in service industries. Plumbers in China make ten times less that American Plumbers make. Safety issues are also rampant within factory jobs as well as mining, but have considerably improved in the past 20 or even 10 years. The fact is, the industry in China is growing so quickly that there is no need for industries to pay their workers more or even improve safety conditions, let alone agree to set environmental standards. As an American who enjoys a high minimum wage and health benefits given to me by my father’s work, it is appalling to see the conditions that we read about or even witnessed while in China. It is the responsibility of global industries, especially American ones, to set the examples for these sorts of problems by ensuring the betterment of the work environment and its impact on the actual environment. As an engineer, I would want to know that my design is being produced in a healthy and beneficial way to not only the worker who makes it, but the consumer who takes it as well.
That being said, Chinese companies do not have diversity issues in most places, and minorities are given equal rights in most cases. It is also incredibly hard for Chinese companies to step up the conditions of their workplace due to the nature of the Chinese market. Most products sold in China that are made in China are cheap goods that sell for very little profit. This makes any wage increase of safety increase hurt the company’s bottom line immensely. It is hard for a Chinese company to conduct business in a strictly American way. American companies, when operating in the United States, cannot even encroach upon the working conditions of Chinese companies without fear of worker or market backlash.
Educational Breadth as Professional Development:
Let’s say, for example, that I was the engineer who invented the solar water heater. And after cost evaluation, I knew it would not be a viable product in the United States because of low energy costs. Where else can I market my product?
This is where the broad education and global experiences come in great handy. Without travelling to China and knowing about many of China’s problems, I would have no idea that such a product would be in very high demand. Not only will my experience alert me to the opportunity, it will give me gorund on which to work with foreign businessmen and engineers who will eventually help to refine, perfect, and sell the product. Many of the world’s problems in the coming decades will not be country specific. Oil dying out as a resource will be an international affair, as will helping to increase fish population and crop fertility. Solving an international problem with a single national experience is virtually impossible. Having international experience opens up the door to collaboration and ultimately progress. There are enough differences between China and the United States to build a physical bridge across the Pacific Ocean. Yet most Americans know absolutely nothing of Chinese culture or technology aside from what they saw in Mulan.
I, personally, am taking Chinese language classes and will eventually be taking Chinese history and culture classes as well. This will not only lend me success in my personal career, but opens up a multitude of ways through which I can strengthen a bond between two of the most technologically advanced nations on the planet. These bonds will eventually seed untold technological advancements which will drastically change the way both countries live.
Lifelong Learning:
Most of the companies we visited dealt in very specific products. Programmers at Hanwon did not learn how to make character recognizing software in school, they learn how be software engineers. They developed the specific technology themselves with their colleagues. Same goes for every other company. The basics are learned in school, and the applications are brushed upon. But those workers didn’t just stop when they had finished one product; they worked tirelessly to find alternative applications or even ways to improve what they had already built. They use the knowledge gained by the process of working on a product and use that knowledge to not only benefit the product, but themselves. Every single engineer or business person learns something from every design, every plan, every exchange, and every meeting. That learning will never stop.
However, sometimes the technology from the work of others can move faster than one company’s work. This makes it absolutely necessary to stay vigilant within the market. Any relevant outside advance has to be analyzed to see if it can be useful; ignoring these spells stagnation or even death for a company. Without this vigilance and constant learning from the work of others, the individual worker will find himself or herself absolutely useless. Imagine for instance the mechanization of car factories. If an industrial engineer at GM finds a use for a robot in a production line, output could be greatly increased, so all the industrial engineers at GM learn about robots and start looking for ways to use them. Let’s say Ford on the other hand doesn’t notice any of this and continues along as though nothing is happening. GM will eventually overrun Ford in the markets with its cheaper cars. This will cause Ford some hard economic times; all because the industrial engineers didn’t keep up with current technology.
Social Environment:
When we traveled around China, few people knew about world events. Very few people knew about the gulf oil spill for instance. Not knowing about such events could be devastating for an international company. What if a Chinese company had plans to operate in the Gulf of Mexico? Most of those plans wouldn’t be able to function right now. It is important to have knowledge of current events in any area in which you plan to conduct business. Let’s say someone invented a device that could pull enough water vapor out of the air in order to provide drinking water? (Such a device would never work, but nonetheless…) It would pay monstrous dividends to know where the droughts are in the world, any places that have had drinking water cut off, or any disaster areas. Knowing about these events helps the business grow and be profitable, and it also ensures the success of the product.
Events in China at the time of our visit centered around school slayings for instance. Knowing about these events can tell you what products can be sold there now (equipment for security personnel and other security equipment) and what product probably won’t be selling very well (school supplies). This affects life a business in the United States because it also happens here. Back when China opened up its doors to foreign factories, numerous American countries moved their facilities to China, creating unemployment as well as cheap goods that undercut competitors. While the business implications of that are fairly obvious, the engineering aspects are a little harder to detect. A company that can’t afford to move their factory to China will need to hire engineers in order to streamline sproduction and minimize cost in order to maintain competitiveness. Knowing about world events can make all the difference.
Functioning on a Multi-Disciplinary Team:
As an engineering student working with business students, there are technical barriers that exist. I cannot bring a schematic to a business person and talk to them like I would to a classmate, nothing gets accomplished and everybody’s time is wasted. This is not to say that the business person is incapable of understanding, just that that person will not be able to understand what I’m saying if I address them as a fellow chemical engineer. This same barrier exists if they were to talk to me about the finer points of economic theory to me as if I were a business student. The trouble-free code that must be employed for a multi-disciplinary team is to simplify, simplify, simplify. The business people don’t need to know how the reactor works in the same way that the engineers don’t need to know about its marketing strategy. Every person has to play their part and the responsibility to know what information is necessary to give to the other members of the team to do their parts. In order for the team to work efficiently, the team has to be very close to one another. That’s not to say they all need share fishing stories, but that they all need to be aware of the others’ needs and duties as well ways that they can provide assistance to one another. No cross-functional team has ever accomplished anything without the communication skills necessary to organize such a group.