Beyond the Sea: Applying Naval Maintenance and Troubleshooting Skills to Tech

Experience as a naval weapons engineering technician transfers over to the tech industry.

The other day, I wrote a post about better showcasing my experience as a technician in the Royal Canadian Navy. While writing it out, I decided to split it into three parts:

Continuing learning
Troubleshooting, testing, maintenance, modification
Technical presentations and challenges

This post will discuss point two: troubleshooting, testing, maintenance, and modification.

Troubleshooting and testing

In the Royal Canadian Navy

As a weapons engineering technician, I had to respond to calls about faulty equipment. It typically went something like this:

Receive a call with very little information about something broken.
Gather details to understand what broken means.
Document the information given.
Brainstorm the initial plan for troubleshooting.
Execute the plan and test the equipment for proper function.
Document the process and results.
Return to brainstorming and repeat until fixed.

If the problem extends beyond the length of my watch, I could turn it over to the next watch. This is where writing it all down comes in handy.

Written documentation makes it easier to communicate the fault's symptoms, steps taken to troubleshoot, results from those steps, and propose further troubleshooting. Also, multiple issues could be active simultaneously, and the watch can triage them based on the recorded details.

In the tech industry

I can generalize the steps above to different responsibilities in my tech career. The process for dealing with issues and responding to requests is very similar. The main difference would be:

troubleshooting resources/code instead of naval equipment
gathering info for new features or details on what's broken
knowledge sharing happens in tickets, work items, or calls
work happens in sprints instead of watches

A step or two in the process might be unique to the tech industry, but nothing easily comes to mind.

Troubleshooting and testing are very similar in both careers. I'm reusing some of the techniques that made me an effective technician. There's a substantial transfer of skills.

Maintenance and modification

In the Royal Canadian Navy

While sailing, there are good periods where things don't break, so I barely had to do corrective maintenance (AKA troubleshooting and testing). This is when all I had to do was preventative maintenance.

Preventative maintenance as a weapons engineering technician included things like:

following a checklist to flash up equipment and checking POST (power-on self-test) features
calibrating equipment for alignment, power levels, sensitivity, etc
tracking tools for returns for more rigorous calibration
logging equipment temperatures, uptime, drift, etc.
keeping up with a compartment's tidiness
replacing or cleaning mechanical filters
topping up fluid levels

Modifications to equipment happen as needed. Typically, this would be planned for when a ship is ashore, as well as completing hardware upgrades or replacements in collaboration with contractors from the manufacturer.

In the tech industry

Maintenance in the tech industry can be something like:

renewing/rotating certificates, secrets, keys
responding to new compliance/regulations
scaling down/deleting unused resources
updating configurations
upgrading packages
applying patches

Then, there are modifications to the codebase to add new features, tune existing features, and so on. Again, some changes require collaboration with outside contractors when more expertise and people are needed.

Both industries have processes or operating procedures to conduct maintenance or perform modifications. My military experience has prepared me to join these other systems. I understand that every team has a way of doing things, and I find a way to learn them.

These reflections aim to create better resume bullet points for my military experience. Shrinking this post down to a bullet point is my next challenge. If you have a good summary, don't hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn (I'll get comments up and running on this site soon).

To read my thoughts on the first point on transferable experience from the military, check out this post: Continuous Learning in the Military and Tech Industry.