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Maintenance and Reliability in the Year 2016

Projections by Jack R. Nicholas, Jr., BS (Eng), MBA, P.E., CMRP

Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals Certifying Organization Exam Director 

By 2016 the functions of maintenance and reliability (M & R) will be universally recognized as a combined, essential professional specialty area in the same way as fields of accounting, finance, engineering, marketing, information technology, management and other vital skills needed by business, government, academic institutions, public utilities and similarly focused organizations. 

There will be over 20,000 persons, worldwide, up from about 1500 in mid 2006, who carry the designation “Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional – CMRP” or a directly related certification indicating attainment of confirmation by comprehensive examination on a broad array of appropriate skill-sets at levels at, above and below that of CMRP. This will be defined and continuously refined by associations such as the Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals in its Body of Knowledge skill sets.

Leading organizations will actively seek personnel certified at different levels in M & R to be integral members of design, construction and operating teams for almost all infrastructure needed for attainment of their business or institutional goals. They must do this to thrive in an increasingly global marketplace where the capacity to deliver high quality products and services must be maximized.  

Certain positions in many organizations in all fields of endeavor will be unattainable by persons not certified by comprehensive examination at a level appropriate to the job in M & R.

In order to dominate their fields of competitive businesses, leaders of organizations in 2016 will recognize that one of the few remaining frontiers for minimizing costs and maximizing quality, throughput and profits reside in processes directly involving and in support of maintenance and reliability. This is an area that is foreign to most senior executives in almost all organizations today, simply because their educational and on-the-job experience doesn’t include such subject matter. Also, while leading business “gurus” mention other business processes as ripe for improvement, they do not address M & R processes. By 2016, they will! Stakeholders and owners should be asking this now! Most don’t know about it or how to demand it.  

More institutions of higher learning (than the two or three existent in North America in 2006) will establish certificate and degree programs in M & R, leading to more of the higher paying jobs that are less likely to be outsourced from country to country. This is simply because many of the skills needed to perform the functions are those demanding a permanent on-site presence of resident practitioners who must be “knowledge workers” in every sense of the phrase originated by Dr. Peter Drucker in 1959.

At the same time as resident M & R professionals are needed for life-cycle infrastructure support at all stages, the number of sources of knowledge concerning the profession will continue to grow as new means of communications are introduced or expanded and new and innovative methods of knowledge transfer, training and professional support are developed and implemented over the next ten years.

Between now and 2016, because of enhanced global communications, complete with ready translation and interpretation between languages and cultures, professional support tools for M & R will be increasingly available from sources world-wide. Their national or international origins may be virtually invisible to users. The new tools will gain credibility and value through information exchanges between increasing numbers of certified M & R professionals backed by standards and recommendations of their professional M & R societies on all continents and in regions where modern, industrialized countries exist.

The market for M & R education and training products, limited now to a few hundred books and fewer education and training courses will, in the next ten years, grow to be a global multi-billion (US) dollar industry as organizations begin to realize and appreciate the multiple benefits of adding to their payrolls  professional practitioners possessing the many skills needed in the area of maintenance and reliability.