(This one is a little long but if you're considering becoming an Engineer, or you want to know where a degree in Engineering might take you, have a read. Maybe, you could share some engineering stories of your own)

I chose engineering as a second option but I guess I’ve always been an engineer so it’s just as well, and maybe even good karma, that I eventually became one. I’ve interviewed a lot of co-op students in engineering and other disciplines, and many have asked “What’s it like being an engineer and what does the career path look like?”. So I thought that I would take a little time to write down what it’s been like for me. I’m currently a VP of Sales in the telecom industry and therefore in some ways, I’m a long way from traditional engineering work, but in other ways I’m still performing the same problem-analysis-solution function that is the raison d'etre of the garden-variety engineer.

The signs of my future obsession and profession came early. When I was very young I remember taking a cardboard box, installing a small d/c motor with a fan blade attached and a few small light bulbs in cut-out holes in the box and making what I thought was a computer, or at least what I thought looked like one based on my impressions from TV shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek. On the right is a picture of me in '62 just a little while before my cardboard computer. Later, in high school, I became quite involved in two things, the school photography club and in the “shops” classes for wood and metal working. I was very interested in lathe work in woodworking class and also started developing my own films and prints in the extracurricular photo club.

In addition to being inclined to “engineer” things, I was also an entrepreneur at heart. I had little awareness that these two natural tendencies would actually combine well in the world of sales and sales engineering. As a very young guy, Around the age of 10, I started selling wood and polished stone crafts at my father’s tourist operation.  There’s nothing better than captive American customers who feel compelled to buy things from the proprietor’s son to show their encouragement for capitalism at such an early age. Not long after that I began selling hockey pools to people in the neighborhood which amounted to running an illegal gambling ring from about age 10 to 13. At that point, I was now in high school and developing new skills that I could capitalize on. I found that I could make a few designs of turned wooden lamps on the school lathe and I could also market my photography skills. When the Shop teacher got tired of me turning out lamps at school, I remember telling my dad that I wanted to make a wood lathe at home using pulley, a shaft and a couple of bearing blocks I picked up at the hardware store for the headstock and a ground down 12” bolt and a couple of nuts welded to some steel flats for a tailstock. I remember my dad asking what I would make the bed of the wood lathe out of and I said “wood of course”. He didn’t think that would work but encouraged me to give it a try.  I ended up turning out about 2 dozen of lamps of various designs and other items that I could make out of turned spindles and sold them to friends and relatives (yet another captive market). Here you see a wine rack made partially on my wooden wood lathe; check out my cool bow-tie and sweater-vest combo. With the photography business, I began taking wedding and puppy pictures but the real money and volume came from being the town’s only passport picture taker and that pretty well kept me in spending money until I finished high school.

When I was preparing to go on to post-secondary school, I was convinced I was a budding still-photography artist and applied to Ryerson University’s Photography Program.  Unfortunately, neither my marks nor my portfolio were that good so I was put on the waiting list.  In the meantime, I looked at a local community college in Sault Ste. Marie and found out there was something there called Mechanical Engineering Technology which produced an “almost engineer” in a three year program. In my first Mechanics class (more like physics than engine repair for the non-engineering types out there), I saw a Lakehead University poster on the classroom bulletin board that advertised that Lakehead could take in a 3-year college diploma grad and turn out an engineer with only 2 additional years of study. So I was pretty much committed, right then and there, that I was going to become a Mechanical Engineer. Going “mechanical” seemed to generate more confusion than anything for my family, extended family and all the people from my hometown for that matter.

I had picked up a lot of mechanic skills along the way repairing outboard motors, cars and trucks for my dad’s tourist operation, and while dabbling in a couple of car restoration projects of my own. Here you see my first automotive project - a poor-man's "Baja Bug" made out of a 1300 cc 1962 VW Beetle with a 6-volt electrical system. Besides being mechanically inclined, I lived in a town where becoming an “engineer” for the Canadian Pacific Railway was about the best career decision one could make in the small 3,000-person community. So between, people thinking I was going to become some sort of special mechanic and other people thinking I was going to drive trains, I couldn’t keep them sorted out. The smartest ones believe they had my career nailed; I was going to repair train engines. I decided to simplify things and I told everyone that I was going to be designing car engines because that’s what Mechanical Engineers do. In fact, designing cars, and later designing jet or water turbines, were the things that I really wanted to do as an engineer. I did eventually interview with General Motors only to find they wanted me to work on improvements to assembly lines and not design the next Corvette. The nerve! They could have at least let me take a crack at a new Nova or something. After all, one of the new releases at the time was the new and improved Chevette hatchback; even I could have done better than that.

So Engineering School, at least my route going through college first, wasn’t too bad. I did manage to chalk up one “I” (for Incomplete) in a course called Dynamic Systems which was cool as hell but equally difficult for my mind to grasp.  I happened to get married to my beautiful and loving wife Loreen between my second-last and last year of school at Lakehead. Unfortunately, the re-write for Dynamic Systems ended up being scheduled on the Friday before our wedding so that put a damper on the ramp-up to our big event which culminated in a great reception at the local “Moose Hall”.  Regardless, I squeaked out a “C” in dynamic systems and the big event went off without a hitch. The rest of my education rolled along without too much excitement except for the night that two detectives knocked on my door and investigated me for a rape and murder that occurred in the area but that can be the topic of another story (it wasn’t me just in case you are wondering).

So, what should I take as my first step? Designing jet engines for Pratt & Whitney, automotive design with GM (that was before they burst my bubble) or maybe something dark and mysterious like developing underground boring machines (those things are hot!!). Then reality set in. How about a position as lead engineer (there was only me and a technologist) with National Hydraulics with the mission of designing radial piston hydraulic motor (a typical commercial version is shown on the right). I later brought on my best friend and Best Man (or Mi Compadre), Rick Oliana, whom I took my technology course with at SaultCollege thus doubling the size of my team. After the dust settled, it wasn’t actually that bad, except for the salary which was a whopping $17,000 per year. The project was cool enough; after all, I’ve flown in de Havilland Beaver bush-planes. Those 9-cylinder radial piston engines are marvels of modern engineering; at least they were in 1947 when they were initially designed. Regardless, my first project WAS pretty cool, maybe cooler than the things I would do in the following few years in my next job at Algoma Steel’s Seamless Tube Mill. National Hydraulics had invested in a brand new IBM XT, complete with 10Mb hard disk. This allowed me to do my first professional application of calculus, only one of two times I would ever really use it after university, to create a model that predicted the stress on the pistons, rods and crank shaft as they rotated through a full cycle at the maximum torque the unit was designed to put out. We also had a pretty bright computer guy who would prove handy to help us implement a computer controlled valve system that was to be superior to the direct-connect hydraulic values in the standard competitive commercial designs at the time. The prototype was massive because the first model was proving difficult to scale for the initial production. I never did see it working because within my first year, the 1982-1984 mini recession was ending and I received an offer to join Algoma Steel for $32,000 almost doubling my annual salary. How could I refuse that? It also involved a move from our apartment in Toronto’s posh Jane & Finch area to a really cute apartment on Breton Road in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

So in the spring of 1985, I made my move into a big corporation where I worked in a production engineering department called “Operations Technology”. It was an interesting role where I got to study, implement and teach the fundamentals of Statistical Process Control ala Charles Deming.  It was in this group, and in the Tube Mill in general, that I met up with a great bunch of guys like Bryan Code, Andrew Ricard, Ken Pieschke and John Pazdrack and some great mentors like Fred Haromy, Dave Ramsay and Wally Thomson; many of these people, I still keep in touch with today. Bryan Code is pictured here with Fred at his retirement party in 1990. There were some creative moments in Op Tech, as we called it then, like developing a “wall profile station” where quality Inspectors could input seamless tube wall thickness measurements taken with hand-held ultrasonic meters into a computer (another faithful and versatile IBM XT) which we programmed to display a 3-dimensional representation of the magnified pattern of tube wall thickness indicating possible quality or manufacturing problems. Yet another design called the “Constant Reduction Pass” was an innovation on a 50-year-old technology called a “Piercer”; a mill-machine which formed the initial hole in a solid 500-1500 pound red-hot cylindrical piece of steel called a “billet”. This would be my second and final professional use of the ever dreaded calculus. My last innovation in the seamless tube business was converting another mill-machine called a “Plug-Mill” into a small more advanced machine called a “Mandrel Mill” which we aptly called the Ma-Plug Process. Okay, that wasn’t a great name but I was strictly an engineer at that point and had not yet ventured into sales and marketing. So that was about it for the innovative days at the Tube Mill.  I then moved into operations management.  That was short-lived as after only 6 months, I decided to make a break from the round-the-clock operations management responsibilities to the slow and easy life of an Industrial Energy Consultant with Ontario Hydro.

This was an interesting time when Ontario Hydro came to the conclusion that it would be far better off to pay people NOT to use its product (aka conservation). The benefit was not having to build another nuclear power plant. Just before this, Hydro had recently completed its last station in Darlington; a project that went from a budget of $3.5BCdn to a completed cost of $12BCdn after several stops and starts in the construction project. The logic was sound enough, if we (Ontario Hydro) could reduce demand, through energy conservation and management, and not to build a new station, we could afford to take a portion of that saved money to sponsor our customers to implement more energy efficient methods. My job was to do that with Ontario Hydro’s large industrial customers in Northern Ontario such as Algoma Steel, St. Mary’s Paper and Algoma Ore division. It was a nice move from traditional engineering into consulting or a type of sales engineering but, we were really selling a concept: energy management. I worked there with a great team of people including Diane Motuzas, Marc Clement and Bruce Dowds who are still close friends to this day. The energy management plan and logic was fine until we went into the early 1990s recession period and Ontario had more energy than it knew what to do with and we were still paying customers not to buy our product. At that point, the concept was deemed flawed and many of us were offered voluntary separation packages. With this newfound wealth, I and a few other brave souls set out to create a computer technology company in Sault Ste. Marie.

At this point, I moved into what has so far been the most enjoyable engineering project of my career. In the Fall of 1992, I set off with another engineering graduate, Rory Brandow, who was still working in Algoma Steel at the time, and my oldest brother Lark, who was employed as a IT manager in a mining company in Northern Ontario, to create Silicon Valley North. Okay, that was an ambitious task, but the more conservative start to that vision was to create a software development company that could provide IT and SW type employment opportunities in Northern Ontario. At that time, and maybe still, the number of white-collar technology jobs for engineers or software developers was extremely limited in the north. Together we conceived a product that encapsulated all of the human resource and business management functions of an enterprise into one integrated and efficient business software application. The product handled Strategic Planning, Organizational Design, Process Design, Job Description Development, Project Management, Performance Management and Contact Management. We launched a company called Palos Bay Technologies Inc.; it was an aggressive product and an aggressive project in software and business engineering. We raised a million Canadian dollars based 50% on private investor funding and 50% based on government funding and commercial loans. I was the only one of the partner/proponents that was working full-time on the project since I was able to leverage my voluntary separation from Ontario Hydro. However, we soon took on another significant partner, Mark Brown, who became our lead developer. Pictured here is our Sault Ste. Marie team including (left to right) Emil Borcean, Mark Brown, Jan Reynolds, Adrian Popescu, Brian Ritchie, Andy Starzomsky, Diane Motuzas and Larry Prong.

We did fully develop a marketable version of the software called LeaderShip 2.0 for Windows which we launched in the spring of 1994. We had successful beta customers and later commercial customers and for a while, we lived the life of startup technology entrepreneurs with advertisements in Windows magazine and multi-city launches of our product to a growing set of customers and channel partners. We even opened an office in downtown Toronto under the leadership of our VP of Marketing, Lorne Riley. Unfortunately, the project was ultimately starved for cash as is very common with startups. We worked with our investors to raise an additional $500,000, but in the 6 months that it took us to do that, it became clear that we needed more like an additional 1 or 2 million to see us through to profitability and at a special Shareholder Meeting on November 20, 1996, we agreed to return the new funds to our investors and quietly wind the company down.

However, this is a story about engineering, and as I said earlier, the experience of building not only a product but a company with a team of 6 developers and another 7 marketing, sales and support staff was actually the greatest engineering experience of my career.  The best times were the endless hours of analysis and design when we worked to closely model the business functions within an enterprise and map them to efficient data models and software functions within our application. There were “Ah-Ha!”, moments when we came upon crystal clear understandings of how seemingly discrete business functions were actually intrinsically integrated processes. These were truly awe-inspiring moments that were as powerful to us as they must have been to Banting and Best upon discovering how insulin could be used to control diabetes or when Alexander Graham Bell heard his partner Thomas Watson’s voice being transmitted over wires creating the first telephone system.

We learned many other things in our short time with Palos Bay and not the least of them was the value that investors play in helping innovators and entrepreneurs capitalize on opportunities and the faith that they place in them by putting their capital to work to transform ideas into valuable business products.  The experience learned there helped those of us involved in the project go on to create success in other areas of business and industry. It was also the place where I made the transformation from an Engineer to a Sales Professional.

After winding down Palos Bay, I consulted for a short time and decided it was time to go back to working for someone else. Actually, running Palos Bay and reporting to a Board of Directors taught me that you’re really always working for somebody anyway. As luck would have it, after a few months of job-hunting, I ended up having 3 concurrent  job offers:  one as a small and medium sized business consultant for KPMG, another as Product Manager for Corel Inc.’s new network computer division (it never took off) and a third for a company called ChangePoint which developed and marketed a somewhat competitive product to LeaderShip. I ended up taking the ChangePoint opportunity which was VP of Marketing for their project management product called REMIND. That was an exciting but brief phase of my career which lasted only shortly more than a year before I was hired away by an ex-co-worker who had left ChangePoint to join Oracle Corporation.

It was in Oracle, that I grew into what they industry commonly calls a “solution sales” specialist in a role that was called Sales Consulting Director. Solution sales is actually nothing but the application of the engineering discipline-made-famous, problem-analysis-solution, applied to a sales situation. The Sales Consultant’s role was to work, in-step with the Account Director, to visit customers and hear their business challenges and later bring back solutions mocked-up in Oralcle Enterprise Applications. I still have good friends Phil Portelli and Steve Chimpman, with engineering backgrounds, employed as Sales Consultants for Oracle. My specialty was sales projects involving Oracle Projects and Oracle MRP.  The best time I had there was working with another good friend named Dave Ruskannen, who was the Account Director, on a project for an engineering and construction firm called Agra-Monenco that later was acquired by AMEC during the middle of our sales process. Our sales strategy was to capitalize on an in-house project tool that Agra-Monencohad developed called Axiom and make this the front-end to our solution. In this way, Agra-Monengo could continue to differentiate its construction engineering project sales with Axiom’s built-in proprietary methodology but underpin it with Oracle Projects’ and Oracle Financials’ robust and tightly integrated and auditable project/financial systems. Under Dave’s sales leadership, we presented our solution to Agra-Monenco and AMEC executives and we won a 3.5MCAD deal which included Oracle Project and Financials application licensing and integration and consulting fees to integrate Axiom to the Oracle applications. Around that time, an Ericsson Canada Sales VP, named Vu Nguyen, was working with a recruiter to find a solution sales specialist; that term in my resume matched with a recruiter’s search request and my journey into the world of telecom engineering and sales begun shortly thereafter.

In July of 2000, I joined Ericsson Canada, heading up a small team of sales support staff responsible for developing and presenting customized telecom solutions to key Canadian operators like Rogers, Bell Canada and TELUS. At the time I was working exclusively with Rogers but eventually ended up moving to a sole contributor Sales Director role working with most of the Canadian operators. So what was the solution sales process in the field of telecommunications? You guessed it problem-analysis-solution; nothing different than I learned in that first Mechanics class at Sault College or that you will learn (or would have learned) in your first engineering classes.

In Ericsson, I worked on many sales projects but the most interesting and my most successful one was to work with a small team of dedicated people to propose an end-to-end solution for a new-entrant into the Canadian wireless operator space. Our team, under the technical leadership of Paul Rhodes and later Muhammad Abubakar, devised an extremely efficient network that would handle the operator’s high voice traffic requirements since it was their business model to offer an “all-you-can-eat” voice service. Some key wireless features offered through Ericsson’s mobile Radio Access Network (RAN), and related RF engineering application of those features, allowed us to propose a solution that was extremely cost-effective thereby differentiating our solution from others competing and we won the deal. Ericsson went on to build and manage that network for the operator and that became a first reference of Ericsson’s managed services in the Canadian market.

So, what can I say about my ongoing career in Engineering? I guess the most poignant learning is that through all my projects, there wasn’t much more to it than, the fundamental application of the engineering mantra, problem-analysis-solution. Sure each problem required an in-depth understanding of differing processes in differing industries but that comes along for the ride with any new job you get and any new industry you get into.  The other key finding for me has been, the primary motivation for me has been the creativity that flows out of the problem solving. I have rarely had a day in which I have had to drag myself out of bed to get ready for work in the 28 years that I have worked since graduating as a Mechanical Engineer because each day presents another problem to solve and another solution to be created. Another key finding has been that it has been possible and enjoyable to change disciplines from mechanical to electrical to software and then to telecommunications with relative ease. Since engineers are normally trained in areas that spread out from their core discipline, any fair engineer can quickly get his head around the nuances of a new industry and begin applying his or her basic problem solving skills to new and exciting areas. The creative problem-solving aspects and diversity of my engineering career are what continue to keep me enthused and motivated about meeting new people and hearing about new problems in an ever-changing world of advancement and technology.

As with any experience, the people are the best part!  Through the many companies and projects I've been involved in, it is the people and the relationships that form the best memories. It’s similar to traveling; it’s great to visit nice places but it’s only really enjoyable when you get to say “Look at that, isn’t that great?”. While the creativity drives the passion, its working with people to do new and exciting things that forms the real experiences. I am blessed to have had the opportunity to work with so many talented, enthusiastic and fun-loving people. Here's a shot of my latest group of work-friends at ZTE Canada. 

Unfortunately, I still haven’t designed and built a jet engine or a new automobile; nor for that matter, have I had the good fortune to get behind the controls of a diesel locomotive but you never know what tomorrow will bring.