Abdur spent a day out on the road (in Easingwold, rural North Yorkshire) with Engineer Phil to help understand more first-hand the kinds of problems field-service engineers face out in the field. Observations from the day were:

• YouTube: Engineer Phil's current No.1 trouble-shooting tool is YouTube. He said that he found the visual nature of it much more helpful than Google / instruction manuals, and referenced the ability to play / stop videos, to see how to fix an issue.

• When trouble-shooting, Phil uses a mix of:

  • Experience / knowledge

  • Instruction manuals

  • Senior tech support (via phone)

• Seemingly in most cases, if the instructions / problem-solve was available easily 'on tap' / 'on site' / 'on phone' Phil wouldn't need to speak to Tech Support (e.g. when Phil called colleague Asif to help with job 1, Asif's solution was to send an instructional diagram showing 'which wires / pins should be connected' to Phil - and Phil then followed this to solve his issue)

• Phil highlighted that 'visual diagrams' / imagery is highly useful in the field (hence his love of YouTube)

• For Abdur and Phil's 2nd customer visit, they encountered at 25 year-old vintage alarm system (the Paragon Super 2) This type alarm system is something that Phil had no specific experience of, so he immediately searched out the instruction manual on Google to find the answer. As a challenge, Abdur also used ChatGPT to find the answer - and ChatGPT proved a lot quicker in finding the answer, mostly as although Phil found the instruction manual - he then needed to trawl through multiple pages to try to find the right page - whereas ChatGPT served up an answer quickly on a plate.

Other insights from the day include:

• Engineer Phil had never used ChatGPT before, and when we showed him it (i.e. fed a technical question to it, and then saw it spit out an answer) his jaw dropped. It was a magic moment.

• Experience is seemingly as important as 'instructions from manuals' - as often things don't work as they should.

• Methodical trouble-shooting is definitely a skill - but also definitely something that can be taught / explained (mechanically). Phil talked through a series of examples of how he has tackled problems in the past.