Electronics and Electrical Drafters

A Day in the Life

As an electronics and electrical drafter, you spend the majority of your day in an office environment. If you choose to focus on electronics drafting, you will create diagrams and schemas to guide engineers and technicians as they develop, assemble and repair a wide variety of electronic devices. You've done this type of work before, but you've recently moved to a company where you handle electrical drafting tasks. Electrical drafting is very similar to electronics drafting but tends to deal with larger systems and devices.

You start your day by checking in with the manager of your department. You wrapped up a project yesterday, so you'll begin work on a new drafting project today. Your boss gives you the guidelines for the project and tells you that you're set to meet with the head engineer in half an hour. You use the time before your meeting to review the work order and to check your phone messages and emails. To prepare for your meeting with the engineer, you jot down a few questions that immediately come to mind about the project.

During your meeting, the engineer explains that work crews will be replacing faulty electrical panels nationwide with a new, more reliable design. He has provided the calculations for this new panel and has provided a working model of the panel. You take extensive notes about the features that the panel should have and check with him to be sure that the scientific calculations with which you were provided are correct. You tell the engineer that working up a first draft will take you a few days and then head back to your work area.

Before you begin work on the new technical drawing, you grab an early lunch. You want to be able to focus on the new drawing without any interruptions when you return. At your work station, you begin by making a preliminary sketch with handheld drafting tools. This old-fashioned way of working helps you to anticipate problems with the drawing and get the extra information that you need from the head engineer in order to complete it successfully.

You spend the rest of the afternoon working on your rough drawing. You send the engineer an email to clarify some of the information he provided and then clean up your work area. When you get to work tomorrow, you'll review the engineer's reply and will begin work on the finalized, computer-aided draft of the design schema. You will likely spend the whole day working on the drawing and making design calculations.

You'll plan to complete the design by the end of the week so that you can give it to the head engineer. You'll then make adjustments as necessary. When the drawing is completed, you'll print blueprints for the engineer and will store the design in your company's archives.