Individuals and businesses purchase insurance policies to protect against monetary losses. In the event of a loss, policyholders submit claims, or requests for payment, seeking compensation for their loss. Adjusters, appraisers, examiners, and investigators work primarily for property and casualty insurance companies, for whom they handle a wide variety of claims alleging property damage, liability, or bodily injury. Their main role is to investigate the claims, negotiate settlements, and authorize payments to claimants, all the while mindful not to violate the claimant’s rights under Federal and State privacy laws. They must determine whether the customer’s insurance policy covers the loss and how much of the loss should be paid to the claimant. Although many adjusters, appraisers, examiners, and investigators have overlapping functions and may even perform the same job, the insurance industry generally assigns specific roles to each of these claims workers.

Measurement and controls, the two facets of instrumentation, have brought technology to an unprecedented degree of precision. Instrumentation enables the measurement of various variables such as flow and pressure. Control works to keep these variables at a desired level of safe, economic and other constrained values. Instrument engineers usually have degrees in chemical engineering, electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering and sometimes in the newer field of control systems engineering.