A combination of spurious skill claims and lack of proper training can be toxic and cause immense reputational damage. This is the sort of thing that keeps operations managers in businesses that employ service engineers awake at night.
In an ideal world all service engineers would have Steve Jobs’s quote on quality of work in mind:
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you are not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it is there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
Fortunately in most cases engineers have sufficient self motivation to want to deliver a consistently acceptable level of work.
Nevertheless, having seen at first hand the revelation that training can deliver, even to those who think they know it all, I have a firm belief that relevant and engaging training delivered in the work environment can set any delegate on a positive route through a working life.
It is a route that values responsibility for work done, awareness of risks and the ways to avoid them.