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Career Research

Student Name

Instructor

Institution Affiliation

Course

Date
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Introduction
Engineering psychology is a part of applied psychology that deals and specializes on

relationship between human behavior and engineering products used in day to day activities.

Information on how we interact with machines, is applied to designs so that they best match the

abilities and limitations of human users. Information systems manager oversees a team of

Information experts and coordinates all computer related activities in an organization. Computer

hardware engineer design computer hardware, develop computer blueprints and test completed

computer model (Hancock, 1999).

Emerging technologies in engineering psychology, information technology and computer

engineering technology represents technical innovations that show point and direction of develop

(Hancock, 1999).

It is possible to compare careers by creating an evaluation matrix, with five points of

evaluation, that is, creativity, problem solving, communication skills, leading skills and decision

making. Then each point of evaluation is given weight in accordance with their importance in

career evaluation. Scores are then awarded from ratings and a total value obtained (Korbicz etal

2014)

In any field, there are a set of rules that direct the manner in which peers, management

and employees, organizations and its clients will relate. Every career has core values that have to

be integrated within it called ethical principles.

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Evaluation Matrix for Comparing Careers - Molowo

Engineering Information Computer
Weight Psychologist Systems Manager Hardware Engineer
Rating Score Rating Score Rating Score
Creativity 35% 90 31.5 85 29.75 75 26.25
Problem Solving 30% 75 22.5 80 24 80 24
Communication
10% 90 9 95 9.5 65 6.5
Skills
Leadership Skills 5% 80 4 80 4 75 3.75
Decision Making 20% 75 15 90 18 85 17
Total 100% 410 82 430 85.25 380 77.5

The creativity of engineering psychologists has highest value compared to information system

analysts and computer hardware engineers. However, considering problem solving capabilities, both

information system managers and computer hardware engineers have identical score values but

engineering psychologists have lowest values. From the graph, information systems managers have a

higher cumulative score and hence the most preferable career of the three.

Engineering psychology is applied in many areas including recreational systems, athletics, civil

systems, home designs and industrial automation, nuclear power plants day to day monitoring and

operation among other areas. As engineering psychology changes with time, design of artifacts that best

suits the capabilities of their human users has become a stress point and a point that draws attention.

Several emerging trends are apparent in recent times (Korbicz etal 2014).

There has been increased focus on cognition aspect of the relationship and interaction between

products and users. Development of systems that can replace human experts in certain areas of

expertise has brought up a new discipline called knowledge engineering. This involves codifying the

knowledge known by the expert so that the expert can be replaced by a software. The benefits of such a
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system is that a larger number of users can have access to expert decisions in areas they would require

to spent a lot of cash and time to have access to such information from human experts. The limitation of

500

450

400

350

300 Creativity

250 Problem Solving

Communication Skills
200 Leadership Skills

150 Decision Making

Total
100

50

0
Rating Score Rating Score Rating Score
Weight Engineering Information Systems Computer Hardware
Psychologist Manager Engineer

this system has been that knowledge extraction has been more difficult than might have been thought

(this is because experts may not be able to articulate their knowledge when request is made) (Hancock,

1999).

With most part of emphasis being made on design for usability and user safety of products,

design for manufacturability has also been a concern. Increasing attention in the designing for

manufacturing calls for interaction between robots and people with semi-automated machines in a

manufacturing line. Attention is also being given to such design and aims at maintainability and

recyclability of products due to the ever increasing awareness on energy conservation and management

of the environment (Korbicz etal 2014).

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Detrimental changes in the environment provide challenges and open up opportunities for

engineering psychologists. An attempt is being made to come up with new technology or modify existing

technology and its products, so that they have less negative effect on the environment. The new

products are not only having the desired environmental effect but also are as effective as the previous

ones in their performance. The benefit of this is that if this environmentally friendly products compete

with the environmentally detrimental ones in satisfying human needs, then these environmentally

friendly products have a high level of acceptance in the marketplace. The limitation of environmentally

friendly products is that some are more expensive that already existing detrimental ones, hence people

tend to go for the cheap ones (Hancock, 1999).

International collaboration among engineering psychologist and human factor specialist from

different regions of the globe on common interest problems has been a desirable goal. With the

increasing ease of communication globally and internet connections these collaborations have become

easy. With some techniques being proven to be effective in some countries, collaboration has led to

modification of the same techniques to suite other countries especially in the developing countries

(Korbicz etal 2014).

There has also been a great concern on human errors in various contexts especially when using

machines and products. A better understanding of this has led to design of equipment that decreases

the probability of occurrence and reduce impact of such errors. The limitation of this emerging

technology is expensiveness of such undertakings (Korbicz etal 2014).

Engineering psychologist should uphold the safety, welfare and health of the public and fulfill

the principles of sustainable development. An individual in engineering psychologist career should

comply with the rule of safety by using the right equipment and procedure in his/her line of work.
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Furthermore, engineering psychologist should only provide service in areas of competence (Hancock,

1999).

An important emerging technology is the use of data mining tools by information system

managers regarding consumer purchases. This helps businesses sift through customer data that seems

unrelated and at the end come up with useful information on their customers. Companies don’t wait for

customer dissatisfaction signs but have created better and quick response to their needs. The advantage

of data mining is information system managers are able to accurately make decisions faster using data

obtained and forecast systems. The disadvantage of this is that unmonitored data can lead to customer

information access by unauthorized people (Elleithy etal 2013).

Another emerging technology in information systems manager career is cloud computing and

agile development. Cloud computing is a model of computing where organizations and individuals

access resources over the internet. Companies are using these flexible delivery systems approach and

platform to have a better utilization of their information systems investments, to increase their

flexibility, to reduce their response time to changes, to have higher ability of disaster recovery and to

focus on their main business (Elleithy etal 2013).

Collecting huge sums of data and analyzing these volumes quickly and with ease has become

popular in organizations and is an emerging trend in information systems management. These calls for

companies to implement systems that are effective, timely and with automatic data analysis (Elleithy

etal 2013).

Grid computing is also a new emerging technology in information management of systems

where, computers with different computers with different administrative domains combine to solve a

task then disappear from the grid. This method gives a safe way to solve big challenges like financial
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modelling. This method further provides a means of giving information to the organization and

customer (Korbicz etal 2014).

In addition, use of social, local and mobile computing to have a more targeted customer

advertisement has become an emerging technology. Moreover, using there has been using of the same

social, local and mobile computing to provide more personalized products and services through their

capabilities.

Major ethical issues in information system management are information property, information

accessibility, information privacy and information accuracy. Concerning information property,

information system manager should not sell or expose individuals information. In cloud computing,

information privacy which is concerned with what information that a person should expose to others

while in the internet (Korbicz etal 2014).

The market is always demanding for faster, smaller, lighter and compressive hardware. The

current trend in computer hardware engineering is the development of hardware chips that are

thousands of times smaller. With more demand and use of mobile devices rather than PCs, the mobile

platform is becoming of greater interest to computer hardware engineers (Hancock, 1999).

Another hardware engineering trend is virtualization. This is where a group of computing

resources are able to be accessed from any geographical location. Server virtualization, a trend that

involves running more than one operating system in a machine at the same time has also become

common. Also power saving processors, multi core processors, integrated circuits with two or more

processors and many other high performance, efficient processors are becoming common currently.

This efforts in hardware development have resulted in reliability of systems, increased speeds and

usability (Hancock, 1999).

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Ethical principles for the computer hardware engineer, include, should uphold highest standards

of honesty and integrity. In addition, they should only perform services in their areas of competence.

This implies that an individual with expertise in one area of computer hardware engineering should not

do anything else other than area of expertise (Hancock, 1999).

Conclusion

Engineering psychologist have highest score in creativity, with a value of 31.5 compare to 29.75

of information system manager and 26.75 of computer hardware engineers. the three careers are

geared by current trends.

From the comparison of careers, the highest total value is scored by information system

managers, with a value of 430 followed by engineering psychologist with a value of 410 and finally

computer hardware engineer with a value of 380.

Engineering psychologist trends are in developing systems to replace human experts, automated

production and manufacturing, environmentally friendly user products, internationally collaborations

among others. Information system managers’ trends are in social and mobile computing

advertisements, cloud computing and data mining. Computer hardware engineers have emerging

technologies in smaller hardware chips, virtualization and multi processors.

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References

Hancock, P. A. (1999). Human Performance and Ergonomics: Perceptual and Cognitive

Principles. Burlington: Elsevier.

International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and

Engineering, Sobh, T. M., & Elleithy, K. (2013). Emerging trends in computing,

informatics, systems sciences, and engineering. New York, NY: Springer.

Korbicz, J., Kowal, M., Witczak, M., Witczak, P., Koszałka, L., Franz, P., Gę ga, K., ...

Ś mierzchalski, R. (2014). Intelligent systems in technical and medical diagnostics.

Heidelberg: Springer.