<p>I will be having a preliminary interview with a company for a mechanical engineering position. The job will requires extensive training and then 50% travel for installing new machinery, making upgrades, etc. I have interned in plant engineering jobs for two other companies and none of the engineers had to travel to other plants. Each plant had its own engineers.</p>
<p>What reasons are there for a company to have engineers who travel to many different facilities to perform jobs, as opposed to permanently placing engineers at each plant? Is it so that the engineers gain more experience or is there some other reason for it?</p>
<p>Almost certainly training costs. If you do installs over and over again, presumably you're going to get very good at doing it. Training you once and then flying you around is probably cheaper than trying to train individual engineers at each plant site. Probably higher quality too - because as you get experience, you will make fewer mistakes and you'll learn what the pitfalls are. Contrast that to each plant site having a local engineer do the install for the first time. Surely there are going to be mistakes, because those local engineers have never done it before.</p>
<p>It's primarily because there's not enough work at each particular place to sustain one person. The work goes in cycles. It's enough work for one person who travels a ton to all those different locations, but it's not enough work for eight people who stay in each of those locations full-time. It'd be expensive for the company to pay those guys to do nothing when the machines are all running fine, and those permanently-placed engineers would likely be the first ones to get the axe in financially troubling times.</p>
<p>The company you're interviewing with probably knows that there's just not enough work at each plant to justify having a full-time engineer there on site, while the companies you've worked for in the past have found the need to be justifiable. It just varies company to company.</p>
<p>That is what I was thinking. One company I worked for got rid of a bunch of engineers because there wasn't enough work for all them. Another company I worked for had three permanent engineers, but one of them literally did nothing most of the time. He has been with the company since the early 1990s but the new guy handled all of the major maintenance problems and renovation projects without any help from him. They oversaw two different parts of the plant and they never shared workloads, even if one area required much more work than the other.</p>
<p>And when searching for engineering jobs, a training program is a must for me. The engineers I worked with in the past had to learn the job on their own without any formal training and as a result, they didn't know as much as they should have about some sorts of problems that I thought would have been common knowledge for them.</p>