The senior tester knows what a healthy unit looks like: HR for industrial electronics makers

An industrial electronics maker builds motor drives, programmable controllers, power supplies and instruments that must run for years in factories and utilities. Before dispatch, each unit goes through burn-in and functional test, and a test certificate travels with it. The sheet lists values to check. The senior tester checks more. The industrial electronics makers page puts this skill at the head of the pressures for such works.

• A cooling fan whose bearing whines or rattles at start-up, long before it slows enough to trip the drive.
• A precharge relay that clicks late, or a DC bus slower than usual to charge its electrolytic capacitors.
• A heatsink warming faster than normal under the load bank, often poor thermal paste beneath an IGBT module.
• Ripple on the bus or the output that sits inside limits, but higher than this model normally shows.
• A faint smell of hot varnish from a choke or transformer during burn-in.
• Display flicker on the keypad when the braking resistor cuts in.
• Drive parameters changed on the bench and not restored before the unit is boxed.

None of these appear as a line on the test sheet. All of them predict a field complaint. The senior learned them from thousands of units and a few painful returns, and has seldom been asked to explain them.

• Units that pass every line come back from customer plants with faults the senior would have held.
• Juniors release units the senior would have stopped, or stop units the senior would have released.
• The queue at the burn-in racks lengthens whenever the senior is away.
• The senior's notes sit in a personal diary, or nowhere at all.
• Retirement is two or three years off, and no understudy has been named.

A drive that trips in a customer's plant can stop a conveyor or a pump house, and the customer remembers. Service engineers travel, units return to the repair bench, and warranty and goodwill costs land on the maker. Inside the works, month-end dispatch hangs on the senior's hours, so overtime piles onto one person. When that person leaves, the method leaves with them. The replacement then learns from field escapes.

Test knowledge is sensory, and nobody asks for it on paper. Test technicians are often graded as operators. So the role attracts few strong people, and the senior has little reason to train an understudy. Volumes are low, and each model reaches the bench only a few times a year. Juniors rarely see enough units of one model to learn its normal hum, warmth and readings.

1. 1

   Ask what is checked that is not on the sheet

   Sit with the senior over several sessions and write it down: sounds, smells, temperature rise on the thermal camera, readings that are in limits but unusual. Photograph the bench set-up and a healthy display.

2. 2

   Write a bench guide per product family

   One or two pages per model: set-up photos, normal readings with their usual place inside the limits, known faults and how each one shows. The senior supplies the content and an engineer shapes it.

3. 3

   Name and train an understudy

   A technician tests beside the senior on real units, then tests alone while the senior rechecks a sample. Sign-off is per product family on the skill grid.

4. 4

   Log every fault caught at test

   Symptom, cause and the check that caught it. After a year the log teaches juniors what to look for and gives design a view of repeat faults.

5. 5

   Grade test skill properly

   A scale that rewards product families signed off and faults caught, with developing the understudy written into the senior's goals.

The bench guide and per-family sign-off belong in learning plans for drive and controller makers. The tester's grade and remit sit under writing the tester's role.

If the senior is a few years from retiring, run the handover as a project with dates. Agree a sequence of product families for the understudy, starting with the highest-volume drive. Discuss whether the senior would stay part-time or advise afterwards, especially on legacy models still under service contracts. Succession planning maps such roles across the works. Keeping senior testers engaged covers the years of handover.

• What does your senior tester check that is not on the test sheet?
• Who can test each product family alone today?
• Which field returns from the past year show faults the senior says they would have caught?
• How long until the senior retires, and does anyone else know the date?

The electronics trade overview shows how tester dependence compares with the pressures on PCB, EMS and sensor floors.