Professional-development

Light/Optical Microscopy

Light optical microscopy uses visible light and a system of lenses to magnify and image sample surfaces and cross-sections, providing fast, nondestructive observation of microstructure, defects, and morphology at micron resolution. As a hard skill it requires preparing polished or etched metallographic sections, selecting objective magnification and illumination mode (brightfield, darkfield, polarized, DIC), and calibrating the scale bar for accurate measurement. Battery researchers apply optical microscopy to examine electrode morphology, detect delamination and cracking in cross-sections, and screen for lithium dendrite formation in post-mortem cell analysis.

Professional-development

Mine Closure & Reclamation

Mine closure and reclamation returns disturbed land to a safe, stable, and productive state after extraction ends, addressing pit lakes, waste facilities, contaminated soils, and surface infrastructure. Planning begins at the feasibility stage, with closure costs bonded against future obligations and reviewed throughout operations. Strong closure practice protects communities, ecosystems, and the industry's long-term ability to permit new projects.

Professional-development

Grand Canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC)

Grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulation samples configurations of a system at fixed chemical potential, volume, and temperature, allowing particle numbers to fluctuate and enabling direct calculation of adsorption isotherms, ion distributions, and phase equilibria. As a hard skill it requires setting up force fields or potentials for the material and adsorbate, choosing move types and acceptance criteria, managing equilibration and production run lengths, and post-processing snapshots for structural and thermodynamic quantities. Battery researchers apply GCMC to model electrolyte adsorption in porous electrode materials, compute lithium-ion distribution at electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and screen host materials for ion insertion capacity before committing to synthesis.

Professional-development

Tableau

Tableau is the visualization platform favored by analytics teams that want polished, interactive dashboards without writing front-end code — used for battery yield dashboards, quality KPIs, supply-chain analytics, and executive reporting. As a hard skill it requires fluency in data prep (Tableau Prep), calculated-field authoring (LOD expressions, table calcs), dashboard design for non-technical audiences, and the publishing model (Tableau Server/Cloud) that gets dashboards into stakeholders' hands. Analysts apply this when building a yield-trend dashboard for plant managers, when creating an interactive defect-Pareto for quality reviews, and when surfacing field-warranty data to product engineering through filterable visuals.

Professional-development

Lab Balances & Weighing

Laboratory balances and weighing technique underpin virtually every quantitative experiment in battery and materials R&D, from preparing electrode slurries and electrolyte solutions to tracking mass changes during thermal treatment and electrode loading. As a hard skill it requires selecting the balance class for the required resolution, leveling and calibrating with certified weights, managing environmental factors such as air currents and vibration, and applying tare and density corrections correctly. Precise weighing determines electrode areal loading, active material ratios, and electrolyte-to-capacity ratios — quantities that directly govern cell performance and the reproducibility of experimental results.

Professional-development

Process Control & Mapping

Process control and mapping document and stabilize each step of battery production so that variation is measured, bounded, and reduced. As a hard skill it requires building process flow diagrams, defining critical-to-quality parameters and their control limits, and using statistical process control charts on key parameters like coating weight, electrode density, and cell open-circuit voltage. Process engineers apply these techniques during line ramp, ongoing process capability studies, and any time a yield excursion needs to be traced back to its source step.

Professional-development

Raman Spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy measures inelastic light scattering from molecular vibrations and phonons, providing structural and compositional information complementary to FTIR, with particular sensitivity to carbon materials, ordered crystalline phases, and strain. As a hard skill it requires selecting excitation wavelength to balance fluorescence avoidance with resonance enhancement, optimizing laser power to avoid sample damage, and interpreting band positions, widths, and intensity ratios quantitatively. Battery researchers apply Raman to characterize graphite disorder (D/G ratio), detect phase transformations in cathodes, monitor solid electrolyte interphase carbon species, and map electrode inhomogeneity in situ during cycling.

Professional-development

Bash Scripting

Bash scripting automates shell-level tasks on Linux and Unix systems — data wrangling, job scheduling, log parsing, instrument control, and the orchestration of multi-step workflows. As a hard skill it requires fluency in variables, conditionals, loops, pipes, process substitution, and the POSIX tool set (awk, sed, find, grep, curl) that makes scripts composable and portable. Battery engineers and data scientists apply Bash to automate daily MES data exports, batch-process formation log files, schedule nightly model-training jobs, and glue together the disparate command-line tools that populate a technical software stack.

Professional-development

Change Management

Change management is the discipline of guiding people, processes, and systems through transitions — reorganizations, system rollouts, M&A integrations, and process redesigns — so the intended benefits actually land. Frameworks such as ADKAR, Kotter, and Prosci structure stakeholder analysis, communication, training, and reinforcement activities around the technical change. Strong change management is what separates initiatives that show up in the org chart from those that show up in operating results.

Professional-development

Solid Edge

Solid Edge is the Siemens parametric 3D mechanical CAD platform — often paired with electrical CAD (EPLAN, AutoCAD Electrical) for full-line documentation of battery production equipment, fixtures, and pack mechanical assemblies. As a hard skill it requires modeling parts and assemblies, generating manufacturing drawings to ASME Y14.5 or ISO GPS, performing interference and tolerance studies, and managing revisions through Teamcenter or a similar PDM. Mechanical designers apply it when authoring a fixture for cell-tab welding, when revising a pack enclosure to accept a new BMS PCB, and when generating shop drawings that go out to a sheet-metal supplier.

Professional-development

Computer Science

Computer science fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, computational theory — underpin every meaningful conversation about software in battery production, from BMS state-of-charge estimation to MES database design to factory-floor analytics. As a hard skill it requires comfort with asymptotic analysis (so an O(n²) loop doesn't end up running over millions of cells), classical data structures (queues, graphs, trees for genealogy traversal), and design patterns that survive ten years of code maintenance. Software engineers apply this when designing the data model that ties cell IDs to pack IDs to vehicle IDs, when picking algorithms for BMS coulomb counting under noise, and when reviewing junior engineers' code for the kind of bugs that cause field returns.

Professional-development

Structural Geology

Structural geology studies the deformation of rock — folds, faults, foliations, and shear zones — and how those structures control ore distribution and rock-mass behavior. In mining it guides exploration targeting, mine design, ground control, and the interpretation of grade continuity within the orebody. Skilled structural geologists translate field and core observations into the kinematic and stress models that underpin both resource and geotechnical decisions.

Professional-development

5S

5S is a workplace organization methodology — Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain — applied to keep battery production floors safe and efficient. As a hard skill it involves implementing visual controls, designated tool locations, and standardized cleaning routines to prevent foreign object debris that could short cells. Discipline in 5S directly reduces line stoppages, contamination defects in electrode handling, and time lost to misplaced tools during high-voltage assembly.

Professional-development

Verilog & VHDL

Verilog and VHDL are the hardware description languages used to design the FPGAs and ASICs that increasingly appear inside battery management systems — for high-speed cell-balancing, parallel cell-voltage sampling, and the real-time fault-detection logic that microcontrollers can't service fast enough. As a hard skill it requires fluency in synthesizable HDL subsets, testbench authoring, simulator workflows (ModelSim, Verilator, Vivado), and the timing-closure discipline that distinguishes hobby HDL from production silicon. Hardware engineers apply this when designing the FPGA front-end that samples 96 cells simultaneously on a pack controller, when prototyping an ASIC for next-generation BMS, and when implementing the safety-monitor logic that watchdogs the BMS microcontroller.

Professional-development

Inventory Management

Inventory management balances the cost of holding stock against the cost of stockouts, using policies such as reorder points, safety stock, ABC analysis, cycle counting, and demand forecasting. Modern practice runs on ERP and WMS data, with techniques like JIT, Kanban, and vendor-managed inventory used to compress working capital without starving operations. Strong inventory management is one of the highest-leverage skills in any goods-producing or distribution business.

Professional-development

Business Ethics

Business ethics applies moral reasoning to commercial decisions, covering conflicts of interest, fair dealing, anti-bribery and FCPA compliance, whistleblowing, environmental responsibility, and treatment of employees and communities. Strong programs combine a clear code of conduct, training, reporting channels, and consistent enforcement at every level of the organization. Lapses can be career- and company-ending, especially in regulated industries where reputation is part of the operating license.

Professional-development

Chemical/Physical Vapor Deposition (CVD)

Chemical and physical vapor deposition (CVD and PVD) deposit thin solid films onto substrates from the gas phase — CVD through chemical reaction of precursor gases at the surface, and PVD through physical processes such as sputtering or evaporation. As a hard skill it requires selecting the deposition method and process parameters (pressure, temperature, power, gas flow) for the target material, verifying film thickness and composition post-deposition, and troubleshooting uniformity and adhesion issues. Battery researchers apply CVD and PVD to deposit electrode coatings, solid electrolyte films, and protective interlayers for next-generation cell architectures.

Professional-development

Hydraulic Equipment & Systems

Hydraulic equipment systems power the booms, buckets, jacks, and drills that mining relies on to apply concentrated force in compact packages. Technicians must understand pumps, valves, accumulators, cylinders, and fluid conditioning, and diagnose faults from pressure, flow, and temperature symptoms. Hydraulic competence is essential to keeping shovels, drills, longwall shields, and continuous miners productive in demanding, contamination-prone environments.

Professional-development

Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDX) & Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS)

Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX or EDS) identifies elements and their local concentrations in a sample by detecting characteristic X-rays emitted when an electron beam excites the material, typically inside a scanning or transmission electron microscope. As a hard skill it requires understanding the interaction volume and spatial resolution limits, setting correct accelerating voltage and beam current, and interpreting spectra quantitatively while accounting for matrix effects and overlapping peaks. Battery researchers use EDX to map elemental distribution across electrode cross-sections, detect contamination at interfaces, and characterize cathode particle composition after cycling.

Professional-development

Record Keeping & Lab Books

Laboratory record keeping and electronic or paper lab notebooks are the primary means of documenting experimental plans, procedures, observations, and results in a form that is legally and scientifically defensible. As a hard skill it requires recording contemporaneously with enough detail that a colleague could reproduce the experiment from the record alone, cross-referencing raw data files, and signing and dating entries in formats that satisfy IP and regulatory requirements. In battery R&D, strong record keeping protects patent priority, enables root-cause analysis when results are anomalous, and provides the audit trail required by funding agencies and ISO-certified testing laboratories.

Professional-development

National Electrical Code (NEC)/NFPA 70

The National Electrical Code (NEC, NFPA 70) is the US standard for safe electrical installation — defining wire sizing, overcurrent protection, grounding, and special-occupancy rules that govern every panel and conduit in a battery manufacturing plant. As a hard skill it requires the discipline to look up the relevant article rather than guess, fluency in derating tables for ambient temperature and conduit fill, and awareness of the special articles (Article 480 for storage batteries, Article 706 for ESS, Article 625 for EV charging) directly relevant to battery work. Plant electrical engineers and electricians apply it during every new panel install, every conduit re-route, and every AHJ inspection of a production facility expansion.

Professional-development

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is the small-form-factor Linux computer that battery teams reach for when they need an edge node — datalogging on a benchtop cycler, an MQTT gateway between an old PLC and a modern data lake, an in-fixture vision system for cell-tab inspection. As a hard skill it requires fluency in Raspberry Pi OS, GPIO control via Python or C, MQTT and OPC-UA client libraries, and the disciplines around running a non-ruggedized board in an industrial environment (power conditioning, watchdog timers, remote-reset hardware). Engineers apply this when bridging a legacy benchtop instrument to a modern data pipeline, when prototyping a vision-based defect detector, or when adding a cheap data-collection node next to a piece of equipment whose vendor SDK is too expensive to license.

Professional-development

Environmental Engineering

Environmental engineering in mining manages water quality, air emissions, waste rock, tailings, and reclamation obligations so operations comply with NEPA, Clean Water Act, and state permit conditions. Engineers design treatment systems for acid rock drainage, dust controls, sediment ponds, and revegetation plans that span the full mine life cycle. Strong environmental engineering protects the social license to operate and prevents the legacy liabilities that have historically plagued the industry.

Professional-development

Python

Python is the de facto language for battery data work — analytics on formation data, ML model training, factory-floor scripting, test automation, and the glue code that ties MES to ERP to the data lake. As a hard skill it requires fluency in the scientific stack (numpy, pandas, scipy, scikit-learn), the visualization libraries (matplotlib, seaborn, plotly), packaging and venv discipline, and the asyncio-vs-threading-vs-multiprocessing tradeoffs for production work. Engineers apply this when cleaning a million-row cell-formation CSV in pandas, when training an ML model to flag electrode-coating defects, and when writing the integration script that pulls daily MES exports into the analytics warehouse.

Professional-development

Robotics & Automation

Robotics and automation handle the high-volume, high-precision, often hazardous tasks in battery production — electrode handling, cell stacking, module assembly, pack testing — that humans can not do consistently at scale. As a hard skill it requires industrial robot programming (FANUC, KUKA, ABB), vision system integration, end-of-arm tooling design, and safety system implementation per ISO 10218. Engineers apply these skills to deploy pick-and-place cells in module assembly, automate electrolyte filling, and integrate cobots into manual stations without sacrificing operator safety.

Professional-development

Supply Chain, Logistics & Warehousing

Professional-development

Mass Spectroscopy (MS)

Mass spectrometry ionizes molecules or atoms and separates them by their mass-to-charge ratio, producing spectra that identify compounds and quantify their abundance across a wide dynamic range. As a hard skill it requires selecting the ionization method (ESI, MALDI, EI, ICP) and mass analyzer appropriate to the analyte class, interpreting fragmentation patterns for structural elucidation, and validating quantitative methods with isotope-labeled internal standards. Battery researchers apply mass spectrometry to identify electrolyte decomposition products on electrode surfaces, quantify dissolved transition metals in aged electrolytes, and characterize gas species evolved during formation and abuse testing.

Professional-development

Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS)

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) generates a microplasma on a sample surface using a focused laser pulse and collects the resulting atomic emission spectrum to identify and semi-quantify elements with minimal or no sample preparation. As a hard skill it requires optimizing laser energy and focusing, selecting gate delay and width to minimize background, calibrating with matrix-matched standards, and interpreting multi-element spectra where line overlaps complicate analysis. Battery researchers apply LIBS for rapid elemental mapping of electrode surfaces and cross-sections, screening incoming materials, and field-deployable analysis where conventional wet-chemistry methods are impractical.

Professional-development

Welding & Joining

Welding and joining techniques — laser welding, ultrasonic welding, resistance welding, mechanical fastening, conductive adhesives — connect the electrical and structural components of cells, modules, and packs. As a hard skill it requires understanding joint geometry, weld parameter development for thin dissimilar metals like aluminum and copper, and non-destructive inspection of completed joints. Process engineers apply this knowledge when developing tab-to-busbar welding recipes, qualifying ultrasonic weld stations, and root-causing pack-level resistance issues that trace back to a marginal weld.

Professional-development

Facilities Management

Facilities management ensures that buildings, utilities, and workplace services support the operations they house — covering maintenance, energy, security, space planning, vendor management, and compliance with safety and accessibility codes. Strong facilities teams use CMMS platforms, condition assessments, and lifecycle planning to balance reliability, cost, and capital reinvestment. For industrial sites, facilities work directly affects production uptime and is closely tied to EHS performance.

Professional-development

Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing inputs to large-language models that reliably elicit accurate, well-formatted, and task-appropriate outputs, encompassing zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, and system-prompt strategies. As a hard skill it requires understanding how LLMs respond to instruction phrasing, role specification, output format constraints, and example demonstrations, as well as iteratively testing and refining prompts to reduce hallucination and improve consistency. Battery engineers, scientists, and analysts apply prompt engineering to get reliable results from AI assistants for code generation, literature synthesis, report drafting, data interpretation, and technical Q&A within automated pipelines.

Professional-development

Industry Standards

Industry standards — from ISO and ASTM to IEC, SAE, and UL — define the test methods, performance thresholds, and safety requirements that battery cells, modules, and packs must meet for regulatory approval, customer acceptance, and interoperability. As a hard skill it requires identifying the applicable standards for a product's target market, reading and interpreting test protocols accurately, and designing experiments and documentation that satisfy requirements for certification and compliance audits. R&D teams apply standards fluency from early project planning through technology transfer, ensuring that laboratory results will translate into products that pass type approval and enter regulated markets.

Professional-development

Molecular Dynamics (MD)

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation propagates the equations of motion for a system of atoms or coarse-grained particles forward in time using empirical force fields or neural-network potentials, generating trajectories that reveal transport properties, structural dynamics, and reaction mechanisms. As a hard skill it requires selecting or parameterizing a force field appropriate to the material (AIMD, ReaxFF, classical), running simulations with packages like LAMMPS, GROMACS, or NAMD, and analyzing trajectories for diffusion coefficients, radial distribution functions, and reaction events. Battery researchers apply MD to predict lithium-ion diffusivity in electrolytes and solid electrolytes, model SEI formation chemistry, and understand ion solvation structure and dynamics that govern conductivity.

Professional-development

Design Basics

Design basics cover the foundational vocabulary and skills that every engineering designer needs: orthographic projection, GD&T, dimensioning standards, datums, tolerances, and the conventions of drawing interpretation. The topic also frames the design process itself — requirements, concept generation, trade studies, design reviews, and design for manufacturing and assembly. A solid grounding here is what distinguishes a competent CAD operator from an effective designer.

Professional-development

Computer Vision

Computer vision applies deep learning and image-processing algorithms to extract information from images and video — used in battery manufacturing for inline defect detection, electrode coating uniformity inspection, and cell-tab weld quality assessment. As a hard skill it requires fluency in convolutional neural networks, annotation workflows, data augmentation, model training with frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow, and deployment at line speed on edge hardware. Engineers apply computer vision to replace subjective human visual inspection of cell cans and electrode surfaces, catching defects at rates and consistency that manual inspection cannot match.

Professional-development

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the small set of metrics that translate strategy into measurable operating signals — throughput, OEE, on-time delivery, safety incident rates, cost per unit, customer NPS, and the like. Well-designed KPIs cascade from corporate objectives down to team and individual scorecards, with clear definitions, owners, targets, and review cadences. Strong KPI practice prevents organizations from drowning in dashboards while missing the few numbers that actually drive outcomes.

Professional-development

Research & Development (R&D)

Professional-development

Java

Java is the dominant language for back-end enterprise services — MES, ERP integrations, quality data warehouses, and the analytics platforms that consume battery production data. As a hard skill it requires fluency in the JVM ecosystem (Spring Boot, Hibernate, build tools like Maven and Gradle), threading model, garbage collection tuning, and the layered architecture (services, repositories, controllers) that production-grade applications follow. Software engineers apply it when extending the MES with new test-data ingestion services, when building APIs that field engineers query for pack history, and when integrating SAP modules with the factory floor's PLC layer.

Professional-development

Surveying, Mapping, LIDAR & GIS

Surveying, mapping, LiDAR, and GIS provide the spatial backbone for every mining decision, from claim staking and exploration targeting to volumetric reconciliation and closure monitoring. Practitioners run GNSS, total-station, and terrestrial or airborne LiDAR campaigns, then manage the data in GIS platforms that integrate geology, infrastructure, and environmental layers. Accurate, current spatial data is the substrate on which mine planning, operations, and regulatory reporting all depend.

Professional-development

Printed Circuit Board (PCB)

Printed circuit board (PCB) design and manufacture is what turns BMS schematics, sensor circuits, and test fixtures into physical boards that survive the thermal, vibration, and electrical environment of a battery pack. As a hard skill it requires fluency in EDA tools (Altium, KiCad, Eagle), stackup design, controlled-impedance routing for high-speed lines, design-for-manufacturing rules (annular ring, copper-to-edge), and reading IPC-A-610 acceptance criteria. Hardware engineers apply this when laying out a new cell-monitoring board, when reviewing a vendor BMS PCB for thermal-derating headroom, and when triaging field failures back to a layout choice.

Professional-development

Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET)

BET surface area analysis measures the specific surface area of powders and porous materials by fitting nitrogen or argon adsorption isotherms to the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller theory, yielding total surface area per gram and pore-size distribution. As a hard skill it requires correct sample degassing to remove moisture and adsorbed gases, selection of appropriate relative pressure ranges for the linear BET fit, and interpretation of isotherm shape to infer pore structure. Battery researchers apply BET to characterize cathode powders, anode carbons, and separator materials, where surface area strongly influences capacity, rate performance, and electrolyte uptake.

Professional-development

Network Administration

Network administration covers the design, configuration, and operation of the wired and wireless networks that connect users, servers, plant-floor devices, and cloud services. Administrators manage switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs, VLANs, DNS, and DHCP while monitoring performance, capacity, and security posture. In industrial settings, OT/IT convergence means network admins increasingly support control-system traffic with strict availability and segmentation requirements.

Professional-development

Arduino

Arduino is the dominant prototyping platform for embedded sensor and control circuits — battery teams use it to bring up new BMS algorithms, build pack-test fixtures, and add quick instrumentation to production equipment without involving the controls vendor. As a hard skill it requires C/C++ in the Arduino IDE, fluency in I2C/SPI/UART protocols, and the experience to size pull-ups, decoupling, and protection circuits for the noisy electrical environment around battery packs. Engineers apply it during BMS bring-up, when building a benchtop cell-cycler datalogger, and when adding interim instrumentation to a coater that the PLC doesn't expose.

Professional-development

Near-Infrared (NIR) Spectroscopy

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) measures the overtone and combination bands of molecular vibrations in the 750-2500 nm region, providing rapid, non-destructive chemical analysis of organic compounds and moisture with minimal sample preparation. As a hard skill it requires building and validating chemometric calibration models (PLS, PCR) from reference data, understanding baseline and scatter corrections for diffuse-reflectance measurements, and maintaining model validity as instrument and sample conditions change. Battery researchers apply NIR for rapid quality checks on incoming polymer binder and separator materials, and to monitor moisture content in electrode coatings during drying-process development.

Professional-development

Blender 3D

Blender is the leading open-source 3D creation suite covering modeling, sculpting, rigging, animation, rendering, video editing, and visual effects, used in engineering for product visualization, technical animation, and design communication. As a hard skill it requires fluency in Blender's non-destructive modeling workflow, materials and lighting for photorealistic rendering (Cycles, EEVEE), and the Python scripting interface for programmatic geometry generation. Design engineers apply Blender to produce high-quality product renders for proposals and marketing, create animated exploded-view assembly sequences, and communicate complex spatial relationships in ways that static CAD drawings cannot.

Professional-development

Origin & OriginPro

Origin and OriginPro are the scientific graphing and data-analysis platforms — used by battery R&D teams to plot EIS data, cycle-life curves, DSC thermograms, and the dense multi-axis scientific figures that go into internal reports and publications. As a hard skill it requires fluency in non-linear curve fitting, custom function authoring (Origin C, LabTalk), template-based report generation, and the visualization vocabulary that battery chemistry papers expect (Bode plots, Nyquist plots, Ragone plots). R&D engineers apply this when characterizing a new cathode formulation's cycle life, when fitting EIS data to equivalent-circuit models, and when generating publication-quality figures for cell-development reports.

Professional-development

Protection Systems

Protection systems — relays, breakers, fuses, contactors, ground-fault detectors, pre-charge resistors — keep battery production equipment and the packs themselves from destroying themselves and the people around them during faults. As a hard skill it requires fluency in coordination studies (selectivity between upstream and downstream protection), short-circuit current calculations, time-current curve interpretation, and the special concerns of high-energy DC pack systems where you cannot rely on AC zero-crossings to interrupt fault current. Engineers apply this when specifying contactor and fuse pairs for a pack-test bay, when commissioning a substation feeder to a new coating line, and when reviewing the protection scheme on a customer's installed energy storage system.

Professional-development

AutoCAD

AutoCAD is the long-standing 2D and 3D CAD platform used across design, manufacturing, mining, and shipbuilding for drafting, detailing, and as-built documentation. Strong users command layers, blocks, dynamic blocks, xrefs, sheet sets, and AutoLISP or .NET customization to standardize and accelerate output. Despite the rise of MBD and 3D-first workflows, AutoCAD remains the lingua franca for 2D drawings exchanged across supply chains and regulatory submittals.

Professional-development

Researcher Profiles

Researcher profiles on platforms such as ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and LinkedIn provide a persistent, publicly accessible record of a scientist's publications, grants, patents, and professional affiliations that builds visibility and enables collaboration. As a hard skill it requires maintaining accurate and up-to-date entries, linking publications via DOI to a verified ORCID record, and understanding how citation metrics such as h-index and i10-index are calculated and used in academic and industry evaluation. Battery researchers apply profile management to demonstrate expertise when applying for grants, tenure, or industry positions, and to ensure their work is discoverable by potential collaborators and employers.

Professional-development

Drilling-Blasting Operations

Drilling and blasting operations break rock to free ore from the host formation, using patterned boreholes and engineered explosive charges to control fragmentation and throw. Operators must balance powder factor, hole spacing, and timing delays to maximize muck pile diggability while limiting vibration, flyrock, and wall damage. Mastery of this skill is core to productivity in open-pit and underground mining and is tightly regulated under MSHA and ATF rules.

MetConn

Communities

Professional Development

Organizations

News & Events

Topics

HUBS

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE (COPS)

Gain access to exclusive events and networking opportunities.