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Asked by chlooee to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 20 Mar 2012.
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Ken Gibbs answered on 20 Mar 2012:
This all depended on what was the priority.
When working on the Tara pump, about half of my time involved practical, hands-on work. While developing the design system for piped water supplies, rather less than this; and when training engineers to use the system, only about ten percent of my time was spent in the field. On the other hand, during disaster relief operations, well over half of my time was spent in the field.
Surprisingly, every task that required doing, had an element of administration or bookkeeping associated with it which kept me in the office, but with the advent of portable computers (netbooks or iPads), more and more of this can now be done in the field.
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Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 20 Mar 2012:
If by practical you mean actual hands-on work. Not that much. I would often need to inspect or take measurements, or set up data collection onboard. But I don’t tend to do actual bolting-up or welding of the equipment that we have designed.
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Jed Ramsay answered on 21 Mar 2012:
Every now and again although it’s not the norm for me.
In the first 2 years of my career my boss wanted to me to gain some hands-on experience so I worked for 6 weeks with a construction gang building a new weir on a river (a weir controls water levels – try googling images for caversham weir for an example). In the 6 weeks I got to try every manner of construciton technique and every type of huge power tool you can imagine! Including massive drills, flame cutters, mechanical bashing devices and concrete mixers, the list was endless. It was a great time and I learnt more in those 6 weeks than in any other time of my career I think.
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