Standards and Education of Reliability Personnel 670659
During the 5th Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, the status of Reliability Education in the United States was discussed in detail. One paper discussed the status of reliability education in colleges and universities; another, the specific curriculum, another, seminars, institutes, etc., another the needs, and, finally - the challenges which must be met for reliability to survive as a professional discipline.
This paper continues the discussion of the subject of reliability education. It discusses the practical application of reliability, the need, the personnel, the objectives, and the probability of achieving such objectives. The author specifically discusses the probability of achieving reliability objectives from the standpoint of personnel qualifications, recognition of these qualifications, and the specific type of knowledge required of reliability personnel, if objectives and some level or standard of acceptable competence are to be achieved. Another objective is the problem of communicating the words “reliability” and “maintainability” to a greater portion of the population. Methods of accomplishing this at various educational levels is also discussed.
The author, in this paper, has proposed some possible solutions to implementation of the challenges which were prepared in the 1966 Reliability and Maintainability Conference. The discussions in this paper describe the basic types of knowledge required of reliability personnel at various levels of competence and applications, thus establishing personnel “standards”, required to achieve the characteristic of reliability in products, through a “total” reliability educational program.