Patrick O'Connor received his engineering training at the Royal Air Force Technical College. He served for 16 years in the RAF Engineer Branch, including tours on aircraft maintenance and in the Reliability and Maintainability office of the Ministry of Defence (Air). He joined British Aerospace Dynamics in 1975, and was appointed Reliability Manager in 1980. In March 1993 he joined British Rail Research as Reliability Manager.

Since 1995 he has worked as an independent consultant on engineering management, reliability, quality and safety.
Mr. O'Connor is the author of "Practical Reliability Engineering", published by John Wiley (3rd. edition 1995). He is also the author of the chapter on reliability and quality engineering in the Academic Press Encyclopaedia of Physical Science and Technology, and until 1999 was the UK editor of the Wiley journal "Quality and Reliability Engineering International". He is editor of the Wiley book series in quality and reliability engineering.
He has written many papers and articles on quality and reliability engineering and management, and he lectures at universities and other venues on these subjects. In 1984 he won the Allen Chop Award, presented by the American Society for Quality, for his contribution to reliability science and technology.
He is the author of the book "The Practice of Engineering Management", which describes the modern approaches to managing engineering, based upon the teaching of Peter Drucker. The book was published by John Wiley in 1994.