Why You Need Engineering Lab Notebooks In The Workplace

As of 2016, there were an estimated 9,550 biochemistry degrees awarded to graduating college students. These students are accustomed to using engineering lab notebooks to properly work on their research. There are many benefits to continuing to support their work ethics. As you begin to hire entry-level workers, keep in mind three key benefits to encourage its usage.

Paper Trail: Using engineering lab notebooks helps maintain the all-important paper trail. When you’re working in a development or research setting, there is always a risk of things going wrong. There must always be a plan if something happens. For instance, you may lose access to research because the system goes down. If that ever occurs, there is always other documents to use if you need to refer to previous information. Since many notebooks come in different formats, you can pick different styles for your needs, such as loose leaf or bound notebooks.

Aiding Future Research: A great benefit of engineering lab notebooks is how it can help future research. More often than not, the first experiment is not the best. There’s always room for improvement. As scientists and engineers further their research, they learn the ins and outs of their own experiments. It’s thanks to the failures recorded in notebooks that further projects to their success. Instead of constantly writing it in different places, keep it in one place. Best of all, if evidence of success is written in the notebook after multiple tests, then it can be used for other experiments outside the original.

Organization: Perhaps the most underrated benefit of engineering lab notebooks is organization. It’s very easy to lose track of your information and research once you use different sheets of papers. The last thing any scientist or engineer needs is to come up with a great idea to fix a solution, writing it down on a piece of paper, and then losing it. It’s a simple issue because the fewer documents there are, the easier it is to find what they’re looking for. Once engineering lab notebooks are filled and no longer used, they can be shelved and labeled accordingly. If there’s a system in place early on, everything will be simpler to find and reuse when necessary.