The Skills Every Technician Should Have — But Most Don’t
When an E&I program quietly underperforms, the cause is rarely a lack of effort. It’s a lack of fundamentals, ones that everyone assumes are already in place.
I spent the first part of my career maintaining aircraft in the U.S. Air Force. In that world, you don’t get to assume someone is competent because they’ve been doing the job for fifteen years. Every technician is verified, on every critical task, on a recurring schedule. If you can’t demonstrate the skill on the bench, you don’t do the work. Period.
Then I moved into industrial training, and I started seeing something I wasn’t expecting. Plant after plant, the same pattern: skilled people, real commitment, decades of experience, and quiet, systemic gaps in the fundamentals. Not because anyone was cutting corners. Because the structure that catches those gaps in aviation simply doesn’t exist in most industrial E&I shops.
I run training sessions where I watch this play out in real time. A 25-year veteran tech walks in, reaches for the HART communicator, and reads off the mA value on the screen as if it were the actual loop current. He’s been doing it that way for years. His shop lead taught him. His shop lead’s shop lead taught him. And documented industry literature confirms this exact gap is widespread, it’s not a one-off.
When I tell plant leaders that one of their biggest reliability risks is a quiet E&I skills gap, the reaction is almost always: not here. I’ve learned to take that response seriously, and then go look anyway. Because the gaps don’t show up on a resume. They show up in the steady drift of process variability, the recurring mystery failures, and the calibrations that look fine on paper but don’t hold in the field.
Why This Matters More Than the Org Chart Suggests
E&I work is the connective tissue of a modern plant. Every loop, every transmitter, every PLC input, every safety instrumented function depends on a small group of technicians getting the details right. When they do, the plant runs predictably. When they don’t, the consequences are easy to misdiagnose:
- Process drifts that get blamed on operator error
- Recurring instrument failures that are actually calibration errors
- Safety system trips that turn out to be miswired or mis-configured
- Unplanned shutdowns that cost process industries an estimated 20% of production capacity
The cost of an E&I skills gap doesn’t show up as one big event. It shows up as a steady tax on availability, quality, and safety, paid every shift, every day, by everyone.
Six Proficiencies That Separate Solid E&I Teams from Struggling Ones
There are dozens of skills in a full E&I curriculum — the Reliability Solutions framework alone covers four levels and dozens of modules. But after running training sessions and competency assessments across many sites, I keep coming back to the same six. These are the ones where the gap is most common, the impact on reliability is highest, and the fix is most achievable with the team you already have.
How to Close the Gap Without Rebuilding the Team
If any of the six above sound familiar, the good news is that none of them require new hires or a major program overhaul. They require a deliberate look at what your team can actually demonstrate, not what they say they know.
Have a credenti, and where the development conversation can finally start from facts rather than assumptions.
Frameworks like Reliability Solutions’ four-level Industrial Maintenance E&I curriculum, ISA’s Certified Control System Technician (CCST), or your industry’s equivalent give you a shared, defensible standard for what journey-level actually means. Map your current team against it. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Mentoring is essential, but unverified mentoring just propagates the gaps. Document what good looks like for each core task, have the mentor sign off, and have a second SME spot-check periodically. The goal is breaking the chain where a 30-year veteran teaches a junior an incorrect practice that nobody questions.
Most E&I dashboards track work-order completion, PM compliance, and overtime. Almost none track team capability. Add a simple skill matrix, who can perform which core task, verified, and review it monthly. What gets visible gets invested in.
Pick one core task — a 4–20 mA loop calibration on a critical transmitter is a good start. Then ask:
- How many of our techs can perform it end-to-end, unaided, today?
- How many can do it correctly, with documented As-Found / As-Left values?
- If our most experienced tech retired tomorrow, how would that number change?
If the answers don’t line up with what you assumed, you’ve just found your highest-ROI development priority for the year.
Your E&I team is one of the most underrated reliability assets in your plant. They make decisions every shift that affect uptime, product quality, and safety, and they almost never get the structured development that the importance of their work deserves. Closing the gap isn’t about questioning their commitment. It’s about giving them the same level of investment we’d give to any other critical asset.
What I learned in aviation maintenance, and what I’ve seen confirmed in industrial plants ever since: techs don’t resist competency verification, they appreciate it. They want to know they’re doing the work right. They want the structure to develop further. They want their craft taken seriously. The plants that give them that environment don’t lose their best people. They build them.
Want to Go Deeper on Technician Competency?
If the gaps in this article resonated, these related pieces go deeper on the people, systems, and culture behind a reliable E&I program:
The mindset shift behind every one of the six proficiencies above.
How to break the bottleneck where one person owns all the controls knowledge.
The same fundamentals story, applied to the mechanical side of the plant.
Why throwing money at the org chart never closes a skills gap.
The bigger framework that tells you where your plant sits today, and what comes next.
Cesar Fernandez, PMP
Live Training Development Manager at Reliability Solutions | Specializing in E&I, mechanical precision maintenance, and workforce development | USAF veteran (aircraft maintenance)
