Research and Development Technician

A research and development technician has many responsibilities within the R&D team. What are some of these? And what are the key skills of this person? See below to know.

Research and Development Technician

What is a research and development technician? This person is responsible for the creation of new products and services. This includes creating samples, prototypes, and the final product. This person is also responsible for testing these products for accuracy and efficiency.

Further, this person makes sure that the product works properly and is safe for its users. This person will work with designers, scientists, production team members, and engineers to create new products.

Also, the technician uses a wide range of tools and skills to accomplish this task. He or she will also have a background in science or engineering. It is helpful but not necessary that this person has a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering, or math.

Then, the technician may work on a team or individually. The work environment is generally clean with an organized workspace. This can include laboratories, industrial facilities, offices, or clean rooms.

The research and development technician must follow safety procedures when working with tools and equipment at all times. This person must also understand how to use computers to complete reports and communicate with other team members. Let’s take a look at some of the skills that make up this job.

Skills Needed in Research and Development Technician

Computer Skills

Research technicians must be proficient in using various computer programs such as word processing and spreadsheets. This is to communicate their findings to other team members. They will use these programs to design prototypes, test results, and other materials. This is using data from tests performed by other team members on different components of the final product.

Then, computer programming experience is not necessary for this job. But it can help create programs based on test data collected for analysis of products being tested or designed.

Math Skills

Research technicians use math skills to interpret test data collected from experiments performed on existing products. Or prototypes being tested to determine if they are effective enough to move on to the next phase of testing or improvement. Math skills include basic algebraic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and powers. As well decimals and percentages are used regularly in this job role.

Research technicians will also need advanced math skills including calculus, trigonometry, statistics, and probability. This is to perform complex statistical analysis of large sets of data collected from experiments performed on the product. Of course, under test by other team members such as electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, or chemists.

So, the ability to think logically about how experiments should be conducted based on mathematical formulas is critical.

Research and Development Technician: Conclusion

As you can see, a research and development technician needs to have an understanding of science and engineering. This is to know how to test various products and make improvements based on the data collected from these tests. It is also important that this person can communicate effectively with team members daily.