My view is that practical experience is invaluable. When I started in this job many years ago, we used to do site inspections before attempting any stress analysis work. It was a must, and it was expected from us although it was not in our standard procedures. We talked to maintenance personnel who showed us around and listened to their opinions and tried to understand the problems they had to deal with. We also talked to fitters and boilermakers in the field trying to appreciate their worries and in the end we did commissioning and construction supervision observing how everything is put together, making sure that it is built and installed as per our requirements.
All this gave us another, I could say real perspective of the work we did in the office and people for whom we did the work, appreciated it and treated the requirements created by our analysis with seriousness and respect.
Finally also worth mentioning is that this approach brought us a lot of new work from satisfied clients, which came as the best reward for our efforts.
Later everything started to change. New generation was not interested in getting dirty and expected to resolve everything with applied mathematics and sophisticated programs, which seamed more like playing a video game then doing a serious engineering work.
The respect for their requirements was lost both with the management as well as clients because of many impractical if not ridiculous things that were produced and then tried to be covered up with “smooth talking”.
In my opinion any training program for this kind of work must also involve considerable practical exposure to site problems as well as to design work. It might not be favorable by some but it is necessary for those who want to be successful in doing pipe stress analysis.