LinkedIn Education Post

Reading a Linkedin post from Michael Milutis on continuous education made me stop briefly and consider how I got where I am today.

Career

My professional “career” has been as varied as it has been bumpy.  I have been employed in fast food restaurant and with a moving company the first few years after high school.  I finally figured out I wanted to be an engineer and went back to school.  My focus at university was electronics but I really enjoyed the diversity of hardware and software applications that micro-controllers offer.

To that end my post college career started out at a small product development and manufacturing firm designing and manufacturing industrial control products (not PLC machines).  I was the “embedded hardware and software” guy.  There was only one other electrical engineer and he was not involved with embedded systems.  Specifically we designed products with micro-controllers (Intel, MicroChip, and Motorola) at the core. In those days, coding was done largely via assembly language and some C as well.

Question all things

I am naturally inquisitive, always wanting to know more.  My career took me to other businesses and industries, but the desire to understand as much as can be known by one person  of the entirety of product development kept me constantly learning and not just focused on the technical aspects.  I studied business topics and acquired an MBA in Marketing to understand the actions that start the product development process and also those mechanisms for delivering the product to the customer.  I studied and acquired a Masters of Science in Project Management, because without effective planning, delivering a product that will be profitable for the company will be difficult indeed.

Team

I have spent years learning a wide range of topic areas and have colleagues and friends that have done likewise.  If you visit our blog you will have noticed that our topic areas are wide ranging but most often in the context of product development.  We are even now in the process of putting multiple blogs on our site, each with a focus area, making it easier to follow the blog posts that most interest you.  We appreciate the opportunity to continuously learn and invite you to join us on our quest as we seek to understand the developing environment in which we work.