a good salesman must know its product and that of his competitors he must know the whole field that's more than ever to with a man whom a supervisor sales force or work with distributors it's not hard to see how valuable  engineering background can be in sales work this is a side of engineering that has never occurred to done before for instance how can an engineer help sell pressures in a highly competitive situation what about the product raw can you improve it research shows that an angular form in the crushed rock aggregate it's called is better than a flat or sliver form the angular aggregate is less likely to slide around under the loads placed on it do you do to get a higher percentage of the angular type from your crushing machines the impact crusher is developed you study it in slow motion pictures some three hundred times slower than normal the hammers break rock and throw rocks together hard enough to break them the product has a high percentage of the desired angular form and your sales effort gets a shot in the arm but manufacturers in a competitive field can't stand still what are the problems  contractor the man who is your customer calling cost him a lot of money when a big job is a long way from the plant so the management sales force calls for a part of all right pressure that can be moved close to the job a management decision based on engineering estimate work imagination and engineering knowledge payoff and profits as the sales engineer points out the improvement to the cost conscious business men who buy the machinery done has a lot of imagination he prides himself on that and in engineering there are jobs that will keep him right on his toes he would like that in other words there is a career in engineering that would fit done well done is the extroverted type will call in the same class is known as the strong silent type he's a big guy naturally and goes along without attracting much attention until somebody wants to get  then they call on paul paul knows his uncle is a chemical engineer who got into research and when pollan magine himself as an engineer he sees himself in a smelly place full of glass where he'd feel out of place in and the delivery he's got to know how to keep quality up cost down one job for a production engineer might be getting huge fixtures that will hold tons of steel in place while it is well  might just as readily be providing an environment where flight simulators can be assembled work where the ordinary dust in the air is a hazard if the production man is turning out thousands of adenike old units he has the problem of making the flow of materials match manufacturing capacity the flow of subassemblies match the assembly line the flow of the assembly line matched demands of the sales force when items must be custom made when everyone is different it's the production engineer who plans the assembly system that will tell each worker what to do each separate order so that the instruction sheets may be written down when necessary parts gathered from the stock room and put together properly set regulated to each requirement but the production engineer works not only with materials and machines he works with men they do know that newly made cellophane is porous and must be moisture proof before it is sold it takes the machine three stories high that coat it dry it and wind it into rolls again these men must buy the new role of cellophane under the only one while the machine is running first he makes a crayon mark on the underside of the material near the beginning of the new row from this mark he cuts the cellophane away to leave a long tongue held by a piece of tape he will g this tongue to the end of the old row this sounds easy until you know that the new row weighs nearly half a ton the cellophane is traveling through the machine at about eleven feet per second and if they grew the machine must be rethread it and the eye of the needle is three stories up how about it mr production engineer do your men have the temperament coordination decisiveness teamwork training and experience to do the job in production the respect power when so readily can really pay off our fourth candidate well let's call  his qualifications are going to be is easy to pinpoint is those of bob or down or paul he may have the aptitude and abilities for something old of engineering and yet seem a little lazy because he hasn't found anything to interest him the simple situations outlined for bob dunn and paul probably won't help x very much his problem is a little more complex so he will have to find more information probably on his own there are three things x can do to get a better idea of what engineering can offer him and what he can offer engineering he can take additional tests to better understand some of his qualifications in addition he can visit teachers at any engineering college who will be happy to talk with him about his future and third he can obtain from them the names of engineers near his home engineers who are ready to show him what the engineer does and what it takes to be one well he's a person who may find engineering a challenging and profitable life's work when he discovers that many job types in this very