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Sell Construction Equipment
QUESTION:Now how did you happen to do so many different
things? usually one starts a career and builds on that in some apparent fashion. You seem to have jumped around quite a bit.
ANSWER: Conventional wisdom has it that us older folk all had lifelong jobs and
retired with gold watches from a single company. Today's employee
supposedly changes jobs often due to corporate restructuring, downsizing,
etc. The conventional wisdom is not necessarily so. Here' a more likely
scenario:
I worked for American Bridge, a division of US steel, in the late 50's when
it had 385,000 employees. The AMBridge Division ceased to exist in '65,
although I left in '58 to go to college. USS now has 19,000 employees and
makes only steel pipe.
In the early 60's I worked for a number of major aerospace companies
building ICBM's and other missiles. There was a recession in the industry
then, and the LA Times showed a front page picture of an out-of-work
aerospace worker driving a taxi. He had a PhD.
Moving back to VA I worked for a consulting engineer designing highways and
bridges. The pay was abysmal and the bridgework boring so I left.
I worked for a construction equipment dealer in VA for 17 years, designing
aggregate plants. In 1979 their principal manufacturer, International
Harvester, went bankrupt, In 1986 the asphalt and aggregate equipment mfr
we represented went bankrupt when their middle east sales dried up. So the
dealer I worked for went quietly out of business, fortunately tansferring
our full retirement benefits to Travelers annuities, which we all collect.
Their aggregate equipment mfr got bought by another company. I had by this
time relocated to one of their dealers in Ohio. In 1989 the mfr decided to
sell direct and cancelled my dealer's contract. I left with it,
I worked for a small co. that had secured a large contract for a new
crushing plant (their first) as their chief engineer, responsivble for the
design of the new plant. A few months into the job I discoverd that their
successful bid had been prepared by a total incompetent and the company was
going to lose at least $400,000 on the job, probably more, no matter what I
did. It did, and went broke.
I then went to work here in Marion for a manufacturer of belt conveyors for
heavy industries like power plants and steel mills. The recent recession
decimated manufacturing, as you probably know. The company closed it's
fabricating shop and went from 165 to 70 employees, from 20 to 9 in my
department. I now work part time for them when they get the occasional job.
Notice that in the whole list there was only one company, The highway
consulting engineer, where I could even possibly have worked for an entire
career. The secret to success for an employee, then and now, is verstility
and portability. And quite frankly, I think working for one company for
one's entire career would be impossibly boring and I wouldn't have done it
anyway.
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