Field engineers are employed by a wide spectrum of industries. As the

name suggests, typically these organizations would require their engineers to work in installations other than their own offices. For example an Oil and Gas company. Here, field engineers would work in oil rigs and refineries collecting and analyzing data on oil, monitoring various parameters and providing feedback. Traditionally, field engineers were employed extensively in construction and heavy machinery industries .Nowadays; field engineers are

employed by mobile service providers, software vendors and networking infrastructure companies.Put in simple words, field engineers are engineers in the field. Let us consider a call center setup. It would necessarily have hundreds of personal computers and servers. These nodes ould be connected by network infrastructure consisting of routers, leased lines, ISDN connections, Modems, firewall etc. The entire infrastructure has to be maintained to meet exacting service level agreements. All this is possible with qualified field engineers working round the clock. Such call centers may have specialized air conditioning, humidifiers, uninterrupted power supply, smart card security access systems, fire fighting equipment and much more. Obviously a single field engineer would be insufficient to handle such a vast array of

equipments. In such cases a group of specialized field engineers is required to handle field emergencies.

Field engineers have to work under demanding and stressful conditions. They have to be experienced as well as quick decision makers to keep 24x7 operations humming along without interruptions. It is both exciting and challenging work which some field engineers enjoy and sometimes thrive on. Studies have shown that extensive deployment of field engineers in a demanding environment may affect their performance. Another factor affecting their performance is the extensive working hours which are often irregular. This leads to mental fatigue in some

cases. Rotation policies to counter such issues are required to be implemented to ensure smooth operations.