[ Local Knowledge]

I remember working on flood mapping for a pipeline crossing a river in Brisbane. I was working with an expert hydrologist in Melbourne. I knew Brisbane’s wet season is in February. The Melbourne expert kept trying to correct me: “it rains more here in winter (July)!” They’d assumed the same weather patterns. They aren’t.

There are plenty of transferable skills unrelated to location, but there is a subset which unwaveringly require local knowledge. Much of this category is unwritten, tacit, and intangible, and you’ll only figure it out by being there.

Local engineering knowledge feeds into overall engineering technical proficiency.