Lack of real "Design" work.

[Gremlin]

I'm heading towards my design license (Hopefully late 2013) and while I'm confident i can obtain this license, others i work with are not.

Point blank the reason is design work being out sourced to other countries. Why is this a problem?

Here in England the work more often on big contracts is sent to India or other such places in order to cut costs, which means people in the UK only get to review the designs.

This of course makes doing real "Design" work impossible.
Making the criteria you have to meet very hard to do.

To achieve getting your license here in the UK becomes very tough, with people hoping and fighting for scraps of work. While you may have one or two designs to your name, this seems to not be enough.

Without being able to do hands on designs, the ability to learn and achieve becomes both frustrating and upsetting.

Will this continue into the future. I wonder.

I would like to hear some peoples views on this. Maybe just to spark some conversation about the future of signal designers, something that was discussed at the last IRSE event in Manchester.

Regards
Grem

[PJW]

Don't disagree. A fiurther twist which I know well when i last got my design licence is that you actually DON'T need to have done much design; the CACs seem far more focussed with the procedures for managing change, determining what to do when there is an error etc etc than actually the design per se. Whereas all the ancilliary is important, it was galling to have saved a box full of what I thought were good examples of the range of designing I had done, only to find that when compiling the evidence folder it was my email archive that was far more valuable resource for the evidence that was actually needed!

I'm heading towards my design license (Hopefully late 2013) and while I'm confident i can obtain this license, others i work with are not.

Point blank the reason is design work being out sourced to other countries. Why is this a problem?

Here in England the work more often on big contracts is sent to India or other such places in order to cut costs, which means people in the UK only get to review the designs.

This of course makes doing real "Design" work impossible.
Making the criteria you have to meet very hard to do.

To achieve getting your license here in the UK becomes very tough, with people hoping and fighting for scraps of work. While you may have one or two designs to your name, this seems to not be enough.

Without being able to do hands on designs, the ability to learn and achieve becomes both frustrating and upsetting.

Will this continue into the future. I wonder.

I would like to hear some peoples views on this. Maybe just to spark some conversation about the future of signal designers, something that was discussed at the last IRSE event in Manchester.

Regards
Grem

[Peter]

It is an interesting discussion point. When I was the chairman of the design licence review group a couple of years ago there was a lot of debate about the perceived weighting of the sections. There are 19 performance criteria in the designer's licence and only one says anything about actually producing design - 2.1 "Produce designs and other supporting information (documentation, software files etc) in the required format.". However, people should not lose sight of the fact that the evidence required to cover that would be greater in substance and depth than other PC within the CAC. Someone who does all of the other bits well but only has thin evidence on 2.1 should not get anywhere. Similarly, some level of simulation or questioning would be OK for many of the other CACs (but not all at once), but 2.1 would require hard examples.

The other thing is that having produced the stuff for 2.1, many of the other CACs will flow from that (version control, self check, approval, dealing with anomalies). The PCs are arranged sort of chronologically but don't let this constrain your evidence gathering and a good assessor will not necessarily go through them in order. It should of course be a workplace assessment - the assessor sees what you do and records the activity against the relevant PC where the activity meets the relevant requirement.

Like many things in life, doing the core bit is quite straightforward. It is all of the other things that can go wrong that also need to be controlled. Making a car go forward is easy. Doing it without damage or injury requires lots of other things to be in order.

As for the main point - yes, you will have had to do some design to get your licence!

Peter

[dorothy.pipet]

On a similar note, what is the current view with respect to Designer and Verifier licences?
Do Verifiers have to maintain a designer/principle designer licence?
If, as a verifier, you no longer produce any design yourself, how do you renew the design licence?

[Peter]

On a similar note, what is the current view with respect to Designer and Verifier licences?
Do Verifiers have to maintain a designer/principle designer licence?
If, as a verifier, you no longer produce any design yourself, how do you renew the design licence?

Yes because the verifier is only valid for categories of work for which you have a licence. However, the matter was considered when the licence checklists were re-written last year. Although it would be preferable for people not to be only checkers, it is recognised that this is the reality of the industry. Conceptually, if you are checking something, you must have formed the design in you mind or on paper in order to have something against which to check the work.

Performance criterion 2.1 and its guidance from the designer licence is given below (the same guidance applies to principles) and makes the point clear


2.1 Produce designs and other supporting information (documentation, software files etc) in the required format.
You produce designs that are sufficiently and clearly detailed and follow the correct conventions together with supporting documents required to complete the allocated design package within the agreed timescales

Guidance
For the purposes of continuation of this licence with an associated verifier’s licence, evidence of ongoing verification of work covering the full scope of this category is deemed acceptable as evidence of production.


I can be quite clear about this as I was the chair of the working group who produced the CACs. Hope that helps.

Peter