Engineers are increasingly facing more pressure to deliver solutions faster, cheaper and better than before. It can be tempting to accept third-party recommendations as they appear as credible designs. However, without performing your due diligence as an engineer to scrutinise these proposed designs, you are dismissing the importance of your role in a project.

Engineers have a multitude of tools at hand to assist with their jobs. These serve to greatly reduce calculation effort, improve accuracy, shorten the time required for rework and generally allow for more refined designs. An inability or unwillingness to sanity check the outputs obtained using such tools is a risk to the suitability and efficacy of the produced designs.

Over the past 20 years there has been a significant decline in the number of design drafters in engineering offices. Where there used to be 3 or 4 drafters to an engineer, there are now up to 20 engineers to 1 drafter. The need for drawing is not decreasing, so who is drafting?