I am an aerospace manager with Technetics Group. I have a BSC in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA in Marketing.

I help in-atmosphere and in-space companies achieve their design goals.

I am a 55-year-old father of 1 and 3 year old boys, and hope to work well into my 60s. I have been thinking a lot lately about what advice I would offer to them about their future work lives.

My typical day

I am an early riser. Most mornings, I am up with my first coffee in hand no later than 4:30 a.m. After a quick scan of the news of the day, I check email. We are a global company with offices, customers, and active projects across Europe and Asia. My goal is always at least to attempt to either acknowledge or answer any question during the customer workday. It does not always work out that way, but that level of global customer response is something I strive for.

7AM

Sometime around 7 a.m. my two children wake up and they are the focus for the next hour. My first child just turned 4-year-old gets ready for VPK and my 1-year-old is off with my Chinese father-in-law for a few hours either at a local park or library. My wife leaves at that same time to work with her students at a drop-out prevention school.

8AM

At 8:00 a.m. the house gets quiet again and then it’s time to review/prepare for the daily virtual office meeting. This is a 30-minute digital Teams meeting where all of the managers (e.g. safety, production, quality, sales, etc.) meet and provide a brief update on their area of focus for the day. It is a tremendously useful half-hour, for I learn exactly where some projects are within their development. Upon completion of this meeting, anything was determined to be of interest to an impacted customer, they are advised.

9:30AM

Around 9:30 a.m. an hour or so is dedicated to either developing LinkedIn content and/or making new connections on that platform. Overpressure protection of spacecraft, improvements in commercial aircraft engine efficiency, and noise reduction on those platforms is a rather discrete set of possible customers. Efforts on LinkedIn are two-fold. To ensure brand awareness for these core segments as well as look for new customers in new markets. An example would be Land Based Turbine companies for their designs are like the turbomachinery on aircraft platforms.

Prior to the pandemic, life was a bit of a blur in terms in terms of planes, trains, and automobiles. I often used to think that airports were stealing my life away 15-20 minutes at a time. Flights never seemed to be on-time. At this time in writing, now and for the foreseeable future, customer meetings will be virtual. We participate in regular Voice of Customer (VOC) meetings and most of their feedback would indicate that the number and requirement of pre-Covid face-to-face meetings will not ever return.

Rest of the day

Online meetings rule the day. These meetings mimic the entirety of a sales cycle. First time customer introductions, technical meetings, all the way through a review of purchase order terms and conditions.

End of day

End of day is a check to ensure that all customer inquiries have either been acknowledged or addressed. My calendar runs my day, so any tasks are set to ensure those customer feedbacks do not slip through any digital cracks. My day only ends when there are zero emails in my inbox.

Pros

By far and away the best part of my work life is the people I work with. I have been in customer-facing positions for almost all my career and never have I ever worked with a team that is so dedicated; not just to the product we sell, but to the customer experience. When I need an internal resource, the amount of back up I get can be a real confidence booster to the customer (and myself!). It does not matter what aspect the customer is inquiring about; the team is always there to support them. For myself, I have always been a remote worker, but I have never felt like an outsider due to the warmth of my company’s culture.

Variety: I am so fortunate to work with engineers from many parts of the world.

Working on some totally cool projects!! The pedigree of spaceflight for Technetics can be traced back to the Mercury missions. With NASA’s Artemis Plan, and the large number of New Space companies, we are very fortunate to be working on projects from the earth, to the moon, and Mars. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working within the space sector.

Cons

Not being able to meet face-to-face with customers. Teams, Zoom, etc. are all very powerful communication devices, but something tangible is being lost. There is so much communication through body language that can only come from talking to someone at their desk or adjacent to their work product. I lack the vocabulary to describe it very well. Much like watching a movie that skips or drops out, there is just this sense that if we were still meeting face-to-face, we would have a better understanding of each other. I have sat in meetings where some issues will come back and often think that if I had been able to meet them in person, that issue would have been long since resolved. There are just some issues within a sales cycle that are better served in person.

Kids at home…scheduling their downtime to concur with a critical meeting so that customers do not hear young children imitating a T-Rex or a Ninja Turtle can be very extremely challenging. I am 55. For most of my peers at my age, this is a challenge that they completed many years prior. People are very forgiving and kind when despite all the best efforts, there is a sudden visitor on the camera that wants to interrupt the meeting to discuss the relevance of Velociraptors and Stegosauruses.

Work/Life Balance: I used to think that this term was something I would never apply to myself. However, it is something I have had to deal with. The desire to address a customer issue that could easily wait until the next morning versus stepping away from the computer to take a walk through a dinosaur-infested land with my four-year-old tour guide… I have learned to defer to the wisdom of my dinosaur tour guides.

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