The engineers in the challenge of the participative expertises

Today, engineers are quite often offered expert positions, conceived as a way of exercising their skills that differs from the managerial function. The reasoning of corporate strategists is quite simple: on the one hand, not all engineers aspire to become managers, and on the other, their know-how is sometimes insufficiently utilized as a result of work routines. The Human Resources Director of a major design office specializing in wireless peripherals describes an organizational approach that aims to retain the finest skills: these expert engineers are "(...) positioned as technical reference points within the design office. In particular, they will be entrusted with the most innovative or technically complex projects. They are also responsible for helping other engineers with their day-to-day problems. Last but not least, they will also act as trainers" (FocusRH, 2011).

However, this relatively new perspective on the internal job market does not configure all the situations in which engineers are confronted with the question of expertise . Firstly, because they may be required to apply their knowledge on missions outside the company, which entails a degree of uncertainty for which they are not always prepared: this uncertainty stems in particular from the need to produce a decision-support judgment in conditions where the major parameters are not always established in a stable manner. Secondly, because they sometimes have to deal with outside contributors in the workplace, who are also called "experts", and in relation to whom they have to position themselves.

It's clear from these remarks that there are two meanings of the word "expert", which are not entirely mutually exclusive. The plan to create a category of expert engineers is explicitly based on the idea that expertise is a professional excellence, the fundamental source of technical innovation. On the other hand, extraordinary intervention aimed at reducing, or even eradicating, areas of uncertainty is a different concept; what is at stake here is the ability :

• identify the parameterizable components of a troubled situation;

• implement a procedure specifically adapted to this diagnosis.

The difference may seem slight (in both cases, you have to be "very good"), but it's significant: accumulated experience doesn't play the same role. So we'll need a definition that's acceptable to both configurations of expertise...