Day in a Life of an Electrical Engineer

Day in the life of an electrical engineer starts with coming to the work desk and using PC. These two steps are the most common every day.
Work desk is needed to have proper space where you can work in peace and do your daily tasks. The work PC, personal computer, is a tool that used for almost every task in a working day.

Lets go not into more depth about daily tasks in a life of an electrical engineer.

Work Time

The work time is usually flexible which means you can come from 07-09 am and stay from 15:00 until 17:00. This is usual work time, but electrical engineer can work remotely or partly remote.

Depending which kind of electrical engineering you work the work time is defined. For example an electrical engineer that is close connected with manufacturing or production needs to be available for the factory workers. 

Workers requires engineer to answer open questions if there are any and if the work they do is crucial for continuous production then there is even more need for an engineer to be present there.
So, for those engineers work time start when factory workers starts and ends when they finish their work day. 
What happens is that engineer stays longer on work after the factory production hours because of administration that needs to be solved that day.

Daily Tasks as Electrical Engineer

If an engineer has some kind of routine then the routine could be something like this:

• read emails from yesterday
• solve open points from emails that needs to be done right away
• solve daily tasks that have the deadline that day or do some part of a longer task
• attend meetings that day if there are any
• solve open questions from the colleagues or workers

These are general tasks that an electrical engineer needs to do. These tasks are also similar to other engineers because mostly engineers do similar jobs.

Which Tools Does the Electrical Engineer Use

In everyday tasks the electrical engineer could use following tools depending in which area he works:

• Email tool like Outlook
• Office tools like excel and word
• Drawing the wiring diagram like EPLAN or E3 Zuken or similar
• Drawing tool like Autocad
• Programming tool like VS Code or similar – if an engineer is a software engineer

Electrical Engineer in Data Centers

Now, these are general tools that an engineer can use, but if we stick to an electrical engineer that works on data centers then there are the tools that are mostly used:

• Office tools like outlook, excel, word, OneNote etc.
• Autocad
• ETAP
• EPLAN
• internal tools that every company uses like project management tools, HR tools etc…

These are mandatory tools that are needed for everyday tasks in order to be operational.

Everyday Meetings

Most engineers would say that meetings are waste of time and they usually are because engineers are called on meetings where others talks and they only listen. Those meetings are not useful and productive so if there are less non productive meetings then we could to much more.

But meetings where you participate and give you suggestions are needed and productive for the company and for the project you work on. 

Are there daily meetings or weekly meetings depends on the department. 

I love to have meetings daily which are quick and useful. That means having meetings with other colleagues in the department on with other on a project. This way we get the information quickly between each other on a daily basis.

Small Meetings

These are meetings that lasts for few minutes and they are meant to pass information what you are doing today and what you have done yesterday. That way each colleague in the project or department knows what you have done and can react if your results will impact his results.

These meetings is what I as a electrical engineer have on a daily basis.

The engineer lead or head of an engineering department runs those meetings and asks all engineers about their input. This way no one is left behind without saying something.

Weekly Meetings

Then we have weekly meeting that is once a week to gather all information between all engineers.

What we do on that meeting is to share details about our work that we have done in the past week and what we will do in this week. 
That way our head of department or lead engineer knows what has been done and what will be done. 

This meeting allows us to gives each other a task if there is an open topic that needs to solved. And on this meeting we all conclude some findings that are relevant for the department or the project we work on.