This book explains engineering practice, what engineers actually do in their work. This book has been written for engineering students, graduates and novice engineers. Engineering schools will find the book helpful to help students prepare for professional internships and also for creating authentic practice and assessment exercises.

Emeritus Professor James Trevelyan is an engineer, educator, researcher and recently became a start-up entrepreneur.
He is CEO of Close Comfort, a tech start-up introducing new energy saving, low emissions air conditioning technology to Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries with a large potential global market.
His research on engineering practice helped define Engineers Australia professional competencies for chartered engineers. His book "The Making of an Expert Engineer" and advances in understanding how engineers contribute commercial value are influencing the future of engineering education in universities and workplaces. Another book, "30 Second Engineering", is helping to build greater awareness of the key importance of engineering and will reach a global audience.
He is best known internationally for pioneering research that resulted in sheep shearing robots from 1975 till 1993 and for the first industrial robot that could be remotely operated via the internet in 1994. He received the leading international award for robotics research, equivalent to the Fields medal in mathematics.
In 2018 he was awarded West Australian of the Year in the professions category in recognition of his achievements.

Part 1 - Preparations for an engineer: 1 Engineering: doing more with less, 2 Engineering practice, 3 Seeking paid engineering work, 4 Neglected perception skills, 5 Listening, 6 Reading documents, 7 Reading people, 8 Seeing and creativity. Part 2 - Workplace learning: 9 Learning the ropes, 10 Engineering knowledge, 11 Knowledge is a social network, 12 Making things happen, 13 Working safely, 14 Making big things happen, 15 Generating value in the enterprise, 16 Estimating costs, 17 Navigating social culture, 18 Sustainability, 19 Time management, 20 Frustrations, Epilogue - next steps.