Allison Hambrick:
Hello and welcome to this episode of ASHRAE Journal podcast. My name is Allison Hambrick, associate editor at ASHRAE Journal. Today, I'm joined by Matt Walters and Jonathan Smith to discuss non-traditional career pathways within the HVAC industry.
How are you?
Matt Walters:
Doing well, Allison.
Jonathan Smith:
Very good. Thank you.
Allison Hambrick:
Great. Thank you. Glad to hear it. Starting with Jonathan, can you tell our listeners a bit about yourself?
Jonathan Smith:
Sure. My name's Jonathan Smith. I am with the Kansas City Chapter in Region IX of ASHRAE. I've been a member for over 20 years now, and my career has spanned about, I think, 23 years now. I'm a past director and regional chair for Region IX, and currently am the chair of TC 9.13 Space, TC 1.6, Terminology, the chair of the DEI Standing Committee and I'm currently the president of the Kansas City Chapter, so very heavily involved and have a very interesting story to tell all of you.
Allison Hambrick:
Awesome. Glad you're here to tell it. And you, Matt?
Matt Walters:
Yeah, my name is Matt Walters. I am currently a lead remote operations center engineer at McKinstry. I run their Florida remote operation or ROC/NOC. I am also the government affairs chair for the Florida West Coast Chapter down in Tampa, Florida, as well as programs subcommittee co-chair for TC 1.4, Control Theory and Application, and chair of research for TC 7.2, construction and design build new technology, and recent member of TC 9.13 for Space.
Allison Hambrick:
Can each of you walk us through your respective career journeys?
Jonathan Smith:
Go ahead, Matt.
Matt Walters:
Yeah, so I was a bit of an odd one, I'd say. I actually originally was going to university for environmental science degree, thinking to do something in the petroleum space, but my father was sick at the time, and I ended up dropping out of college in my second or third, I think, in the middle of my third semester. I got a job cleaning pools at a resort called the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas as a way to pay my way through community college. As I was working there and kind of in with all the trades because in the pool department, we shared department with MEP, mechanical electrical plumbing, all back of house. And this is a 5 million-square-foot resort, and we have water parks. We have an 8,000-ton central killer plant. We have 120 million BTU hot water boiler and high pressure steam systems.
So there's really big ticket equipment, but at a resort, you don't have any of those consequences in the critical environments you usually find the scale of equipment in. So it really gave us a lot of freedom to try things, experiment, throw parts and stuff, and kind of see what happens. I started cross-training with the HVAC Department since the pay for pools wasn't quite cutting it. And I found a career path that I really enjoyed. My director at the time was easily making mid six figures with a GED, and me being very ADHD and just not really enjoying the traditional educational environment decided, "I don't think I need to go back to school. I think I see a successful career path I can have here without finishing that college degree." Throughout our time there in facilities world, we call ourselves building engineers, and I probably took that way too seriously when I was younger, and I wanted to make myself a real engineer.
I was very thankful to my first company, Marriott, who when I was on the clock, if I was finished with all of my preventative maintenance and caught up on all my calls and work, they would allow me to study on the clock. Over the course of six years, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I spent six to 7,000 hours just nose in a book or online. I would identify systems in the facility where I didn't know what they were. I would spend a couple of weeks learning everything about it down to the principles of physics behind how it worked, and then I would take it apart and put it back together. I essentially did my way through that, and I moved to Denver to open up one of the new inaugural properties, the Gaylord Rockies. I tried to commission that by myself as a facility engineer.
It was a $1.2 billion construction project, I believe the largest construction product in the US at the time. In doing that, I learned so much because that building had no commissioning from the outset. So there was a lot of, shall we say, catastrophes that occurred. I think our very first night we were open, our only functioning boiler exploded, and the tubes burst, and we had water flooding everywhere. We had dozens of coils freeze. I mean, you name it, it happened. That experience just taught me so much about system design, about system verification. All the things that can go wrong, Murphy's Law, really hit home for me in that one. Through my time there, I got recruited by Johnson Controls to be a controls design engineer at their branch in Denver, Colorado. My third day on the job, they had me go back and start addressing the big list of commissioning issues that I had made them at the Gaylord Rockies. So that was nice, a bit of a touché.
And that was right around 2020 in January. And then in March of 2020, the first part of my JCI career was doing a lot of hospital work, HCA, UCHealth. And then, in March, COVID really hit full force, and all of these hospital jobs that were already behind schedule as most construction jobs are, those deadlines got accelerated because they needed those beds immediately. I found myself pretty quickly working 70 to 90 hours a week for the next 12 to 18 months, and it was really a trial by fire. I learned so much about how things work, how systems are designed and engineered, how programming works and just how contractors work together and where the gaps in scope are. And it really opened my eyes to some of the problems that are extremely pervasive throughout our industry and throughout really every industry that has to do with designing, building, operating or maintaining anything in today's society.
After that, I had enough of working that many hours, and I kind of missed freedom, being locked down from COVID, and McKinstry reached out to me, and they had a job in Tampa, Florida. They said, "We don't really know exactly why we're hiring you or what we want you to do, but we think we need somebody with a background in controls and a background in facility operations because those things are kind of uncommon to have together." And I said, "Sign me up. Let's go." I came down here to Florida, and down here we had a client that was about 30 million square feet across 300 facilities. And we were basically trying to figure out how do we get a handle on operations because in today's current state, with the skill and the labor shortage that we have, I mean, we may remember from our podcast with President Dennis, but right now, I think we have over 7 million open skilled labor positions in the US alone, replacement rate for technicians of every five retiring, we're only getting two back, and demand for the type of work that we do is just skyrocketing every year.
So it's really a struggle. And this particular client is a public education client, so their resources are very limited. So basically, we got hired to try to figure out what is the future of facility operations? How do we absolutely maximize the efficiency of limited resources? And we're spending some time with this client as a systems engineer. I kind of had this idea like, Hey, I think we need to build… and I articulated something that, to my vice president of operations, sounded like a ROC. And he said, "Yeah, I know what that is. It's a remote operation center." He said, "Go ahead and build it." So I did. I spent the last four or five years putting together a team to essentially do what—Let me back up here and say, if I had to say I had one expertise that whenever I'm in any room, what am I uniquely better at than most people, it's root cause analysis. And what I found was at scale, when we have technicians from vendors or contractors servicing infrastructure and facilities, they're often not getting to the root cause. We're seeing mostly symptom mitigation.
So I tried to say, how can I take my skill for root cause analysis and expand it so it can be done at scale? And I essentially built a team to do exactly that, multidisciplinary in nature, able to hit issues from multiple perspectives. And that's essentially what we did, and it's been a massive success, and I really enjoyed it. And now, I'm lead engineer over that team and even involved in strategic enterprise goals and technical direction. So it's been really, really fulfilling.
Allison Hambrick:
That's awesome. What about you, Jonathan?
Jonathan Smith:
Yeah, I haven't had a boiler blow up on me. That's pretty impressive there, Matt. That would've been a sight to see, but my career journey has been a little different than that. I started out the traditional way where I went to college and spent the, I don't know, five years or whatever it was, five, six years getting an architectural engineering degree, and we had to decide what we wanted to do. I've had several internships when I was in college, and I realized real quick that being behind a desk all day was not for me. Being a traditional designer, just I couldn't see myself doing that. My father had done that for 30 plus years, and it wasn't my thing. So I started looking into the commissioning side of things out in the field. I'd had an internship where I did test and balance out in the field and really thought that was exciting because I learned so much so fast that I couldn't learn on a design board.
They always say hands-on is the way to go, and that's exactly what happened. So I took a job in Kansas City, and my boss told me, he goes, "You're going to Denver tomorrow, and we got a big job for you to run." And I'm a 23, 24-year-old kid going, "Oh, boy, this is going to be fun." A couple of 11-story laboratories about as crazy as you can get when it comes to commissioning a facility, and he said, "Here you go. There's a bunch of books over here I need you to fill out." So trial by fire was one way I got introduced to it, but I found it was very, very, very fulfilling for me because I learned so much so fast on the job versus being a traditional designer. It takes a while for you to understand what's going on. You don't have a choice when you're doing commissioning. You got to figure it out really quick.
And there's nothing more exciting being, like I said, a 24-year-old kid and looking around the table and you've got the engineer of record, the general contractor, the owner, the architect, all the major players that are sitting there around the table and you're telling them about all the problems there are and what needs to be fixed. And they're actually somewhat listening to you, and then they have to listen to you because you work for the owner. So when I did that, I found like, "Man, I really enjoy doing controls." So I decided Siemens had an opportunity for me to go over to them as a design engineer. So I went over there as a design engineer for HVAC controls for a couple of years, and it was amazing the baseline of information that I took in while doing those designs.
And then, they came, approached me and they said, this was right about the 2008, 2009 recession time, and I was like, "Well, I better be careful. Don't want to lose my job here." They asked me if I wanted to be a performance contracting engineer, an energy engineer, go out and look at old buildings and see how we can make them more energy efficient. Did that for about five years. It was very fulfilling. And again, that's not very traditional for a traditional engineer to do those types of things, but that experience showed me that there's a lot you can do with an engineering degree other than just design. That was very field-based as well, and it had some design associated with it. And while I was doing that, I realized something. I have a skillset to be able to talk to people. Most engineers are introvert. I'm the other way around. If you ask anybody that knows me, they'll tell you, "Yeah, exactly."
But I found out why am I not in sales. I'm sitting here. I'm selling the job. I'm doing all this work. I should go into sales. And so, they offered me a sales role within the organization at Siemens. I spent almost 15 years of my career there, and I sold building automation for a while. And that was fun too because you're out there with the customers, you might as well see what you can do to solve their problems, right? And after that, they asked me, they said, "Well, how about you go ahead and just do business development for us now," which is an even higher level where I'm talking to all engineers, architects, owners, general contractors, you name it. And I'm just out there giving presentations, telling them about the latest, greatest technology, asking what their problems are, solving their problems, getting the team. There's a lot of teamwork and management involved with that because you got to get the smart players involved to do all the nitty-gritty work.
But the reality of it is I just found that I had this gift to go out and talk to people, and I had the technical knowledge to speak technical if I had to. And I did that for about almost eight years of my 15 years at Siemens. And then, I said maybe it's time for a new challenge. And I became the director of mechanical engineering for HDR, and we had over 28 offices, 200 plus engineers. And my role with them was to make sure everything was standardized across the board for all the engineers. The way they do things, their scope of work, the specifications, the details. Everything you name that you need to do for design was underneath me to have to figure out how do we standardize this so everybody's happy and it makes sense and the quality doesn't suffer and all that. So I did that for the last three years. It was very, very fulfilling.
I'd say probably the most fulfilling thing of everything was the ASHRAE part of my career. Everybody thinks that's funny, "That's a volunteer organization. Why do you consider that part of your career?" I say I wouldn't be where I'm at now without all of that, being able to learn. Believe it or not, I was scared to talk to people before I joined ASHRAE, and then that's where I learned my people skills, my soft skills per se. And I would've never dreamed I'd have been able to become a distinguished lecturer, but now, that's what I'm doing all the time, and it's really a joy. So it's been a very roundabout career with me with a lot of non-traditional type engineering roles. So that's me in a nutshell.
Allison Hambrick:
What do you wish you'd known about the HVAC and engineering industries before entering them?
Matt Walters:
As somebody who didn't get their degree and coming up to the trades, I really wish I had known organizations like ASHRAE were available to people that weren't, quote, unquote, "real engineers." I never felt like I was allowed to try and participate in something like that. And just me being the guy who just always loved science and mathematics and was curious and really loved the job that I did and wanted to take it to the most granular, umpteenth degree that I could, I found a lot of fantastic learning resources online, but I think I could have taken it even farther if I was more aware of something like ASHRAE and known that it was more open to more than just a particular type of engineers. I think that would've really helped me out a lot.
I would also say the diversity, there's so much, the level of technical integration. In the beginning of your career when you're not useful yet, that is some of the best time you have to learn because nobody knows who you are. They don't really think you can do anything. So there's probably a lot of downtime that you have before you're really getting involved in a lot of projects or people are asking you for help or you become truly important. And that's where the most condensed learning of my career was. And I think if I could go back and do it again, I would focus a little more on the IT side. I still learn today every day and especially through ASHRAE and technical committees, but now that I manage a team and I'm leading technical directives, there's much less time to do that than I would otherwise like. And some of the most interesting things to me as an engineer is when you are solving for gaps that the industry maybe isn't even ready for yet.
I think Jonathan could probably echo this. We put a lot on our controls people in this industry. I mean, we expect them to have five or six different masteries of different disciplines, and it's just not reasonable. There's so many niche skills and areas in this industry that really aren't covered or served. As a result, our industry ends up being 10 or 20 years behind technology curves where it should be. I mean, most of our automation counters can't even make software tools that work without admin credentials to a laptop and they don't know why. So it's just, there's so many different things I would've learned about in my career had I known that ASHRAE was a factor and how technologically integrated this industry really was.
Jonathan Smith:
You're spot on with that, man. I agree 100%. For me, I would say if I would've known that I could have been a pipefitter right out of school or gone into the trades, because they weren't really pushing the trades much in the late '90s when I was in high school. They were like, "Go get that degree." I've learned that I could have got my degree while I was working out in the field making money. I wouldn't have had to worry about all the debt that came along with getting a college degree. That's probably something I wish I'd have known before I entered this, and then I could have done it all at the same time. And then, you've got the best of both worlds. You're learning out of the book, but you're learning out in the field exactly what the book says and then some. That's the best knowledge that you can get is out in the field. And I wish they would've preached that more in my head in the late '90s, but they just weren't doing it as much back then. So that's probably something I would've known.
And also, the diversity, so much diversity in the HVAC market on what you can do. Obviously, I'm living proof that you can do many different things and wear many different hats throughout your careers. They didn't really talk about that much when I was in college either. I kind of found that out on my own. So through organizations like ASHRAE, that has helped me along the way to be able to decide which direction do I want to go.
Matt Walters:
If I could just echo something you said, Jonathan, there about, I'm 31, so I'm millennial. And for me too, I had very educated parents, grew up in a reasonably well-off household. So even in my age, it was very degree heavy. And even just me being so ADHD, when I initially graduated high school, I wanted to go to community college because it's cheaper. My father kind of told me something along the lines of, "No son of mine goes to community college." Kind of threatened like, "Hey, if you don't go to university, I'm not helping you with the finance for your education." So I was like, "Well, I guess I know what I got to do." And when I initially dropped out of college, I really felt like a total failure. I thought I wasn't going to go anywhere in life, really got me down and just if I had known how interesting, how fun, just—Like I said, I always love science and really being in these systems, being able to see the science that I'd always been interested in live and breathe and come to life and be tangible, I think, was really exceptional.
So I talk to kids a lot, especially with the client that I have. I regularly go to high schools and try to talk to kids about the different potential career paths. And I always say the value of a degree has been decreasing as of late. But I think for STEM fields, it still really makes a lot of sense, especially if you can get scholarships and grants, absolutely go for it. College has phenomenal networking as well. That's a really, I think, underdiscussed benefit of going to university. But listen, if you're struggling and you just really don't think going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is for you, there's other options. You don't have to, and that you can have a really fulfilling career. Another thing that Jonathan mentioned earlier with the ability, the soft skills, networking. I grew up in a family where my dad was in a lot of rooms where big business parties were happening or politicking, and I got to learn a lot of that growing up through my childhood. Most people don't get that exposure. And I do think places like ASHRAE and these conferences can give you some of that exposure. And especially if you want to be an engineer without a degree, those soft skills are critical because it's who you know because your credentials are immediately not enough to get you in the door. You have to prove yourself, and you have to make it known to other people around you that you are competent. So ASHRAE is a great way to train those skills up.
Jonathan Smith:
Matt, to add onto that, one of the things that I learned at a young age is my father was a non-degreed structural engineer for 40 plus years. And when he learned I was going to go get my engineering degree and my license after that, he told me one thing. He said, "Just because you're getting that degree and because you're getting that license doesn't mean you're the smartest person in the room. You respect everybody at that table and listen to what they have to say because odds are the contractors and the guys in the field know how to design it and build it better than you ever will when you're right out of school."
If I could give anybody any advice, it'd be exactly that because I can't imagine what I would've been like as an engineer if I wouldn't have heard those words come out of my father's mouth because especially going in commissioning right out of school, they know that you're a young one. They know you don't know anything, so they're going to try and pick on you, but you got to trust what they're saying because they know what they're talking about because they've been doing it for so long. So yeah.
Matt Walters:
Yes, sir.
Allison Hambrick:
So we've touched on this a bit already, especially with what you're talking about with regard to trusting experience, but to talk about your own experience, how did taking on a more field-based role shape your professional development?
Matt Walters:
I've always been a very hands-on individual. I used to get laughed at at work because I was the guy who would, again, with my specialty being diagnostics and root cause analysis, I would walk around with a mechanical stethoscope and listen to my equipment. I used to remember when I was a pool tech and I would do my rounds in my pump rooms, I got to a point where I could feel the vibrations in the floor and hear the changes in the system, but I didn't even need to walk in the room. I could walk down the hallway, and I could know exactly what's happening. When we opened that Gaylord Rockies property, I remember my first position there was third shift. And when we first got there, the property wasn't even turned over to us fully. We didn't have a functioning sequence of operations for our chiller plant.
I used to lay underneath the chillers at night with my hands on the barrel, imagining that I was the water flowing through the system. And I memorized every turn, every U-bend, every inch of that system. I had it memorized because I wanted to be able to handle any issue that could possibly arise immediately and know that system like the back of my hand. It's something that if you haven't been in the field and really put your hands in these things, the intuition that you can gain from just these intangibles is really hard to articulate. When I actually became something akin to an engineer at my Johnson role in designing and implementing systems, my experience as an operator with that intuition, that feeling, just made me so much better of an engineer. I could really predict things better when I was designing sequences or programs or looking at flow charts or equipment schedules from mechanical engineers.
I could really troubleshoot and foresee all the problems that would happen. And in my owner trainings too, I remember getting consistent comments from clients on how phenomenal my owner trainings were because I would go over like, "Here are all the things that are likely to fail, how they're likely to fail, and how you can take manual control of your system in an emergency and then walk it back into automatic control without having to shut down and restart your system," just really presenting designs and implementation that I would want to receive as a client. I mean, really that's what sets me apart from other engineers that I meet if they haven't had that field experience, I think.
Jonathan Smith:
Can't agree with you more there, Matt. You almost took the words right out of my mouth there. But I would say from my perspective, learning how things are supposed to work versus what they look like on paper is the biggest thing that helped shape me in my professional career. Being able to be out in the field and find those problems and be able to fix those problems, it helped several things, but it really helped my soft skills as well because you cannot hide behind a computer when you're out there in the field in the heat of the battle and something breaks and you got to fix it. Or you stroke a damper, and next thing you know, it was the wrong one, or you turn on the fans, and the exhaust fans ramp up too fast and you suck the ceiling out. Now, that's always fun when you're 24 years old. How do you explain that to the owner?
And you learn, "Okay, this is what we learned for that. Well, we need to make sure that the code's right before we hit the go button." So the little things like that have really, early in my career, helped me shape the way I am today. My thought processes, the way I talk to a customer, the way I ask questions to find out what the problem is all came from those first couple of years out in the field.
Allison Hambrick:
So, boiler explosions aside, do you have any anecdotal experiences to share, something that happened in the field that kind of helped shape your direction?
Matt Walters:
Yeah, I think my time at Johnson, especially during COVID, it was really eye-opening, like I mentioned earlier. I'll share a scenario without sharing any company names, but I was on a healthcare project. This is multiple projects actually, probably a dozen of them, where to give you an idea of how this labor and skill shortage is really impacting buildings and to give maybe owners and operators an understanding of when you buy a building or a renovation, why doesn't stuff work? I literally had subcontractors because they're so short-staffed and in such high demand that would complete maybe 90% of their contract and walk off site. I've been told to my face, "If you hold us to our contract, we will fire you as a client and never work for you again." And that means as the engineer, if maybe they didn't pull wire to a couple units, I have to eat that.
I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, they're in that much demand. If I extrapolate this out to all trades and all construction and forget buildings and HVAC, electrical infrastructure, I mean, there's critical systems that we rely on to thrive and survive as humans. If this problem keeps getting worse, how is anything going to function?" I think that really shaped how I look at and design teams, systems, procedures. I always look now at a higher purpose goal. In every job that I do, the problem I'm actually trying to solve is how do I prevent the degradation of my nation's infrastructure? That is the North Star that I'm always pointed at. And for me, it's ADHD and easily distractable. Having that really strong higher purpose goal helps me calibrate all of my micro decisions in my day-to-day actions to make sure that I'm pointing in the correct direction. I would say that has allowed me to just develop processes that are incredibly efficient, be very creative and innovative in my approach to things because it's always asking yourself, "Is this scalable? Is this repeatable? Is it practical, and is it maintainable?"
Every time that we touch a system or optimize anything, we have to be doing it in a way that makes it easier for future technicians, specialists, engineers to work on it, that reduces the amount of hands that it takes to maintain a system over its life. For a long time, our industry prioritized things like energy efficiency, and sometimes a hyperefficient system comes at the cost of increased complexity. How does it look in engineering? For me, a lot of it is maybe there's a less efficient design that's still efficient, that has a smaller complexity, and operationally over the life of the building, I'll actually get up more energy savings out of a system that the operators can operate because they don't have enough hands and they don't have enough skill. So that was really a very impactful experience for me, just seeing how starved the industry is for talent and people that can show up every day and care and take real purpose in their work. It's hard.
Jonathan Smith:
100% agree with you on that one, Matt. For me, I would say there was one that early, early in my career where I learned that finger pointing is not the answer. Coming up with a solution as the group is the way to go and being honest and upfront about things. We had a situation where everybody was in the room. It was early when I was doing commissioning. We weren't meeting airflow on the top floor and it's like, "What's going on?" And everybody kept pointing the finger at each other. I had to stand up and say to all of them, "It doesn't matter who did the problem. We have to get this working by this date, or we're all going to have some serious damages against us and it's not going to be good." And being able to do that and shift the thought process of the room, just think as a group instead of it's not my fault, it's his or hers or whoever, was something that really stuck with me throughout the rest of my career all the way up into where we fast-forward into when I'm doing sales and business development. We had a project where something had been installed, and then all of a sudden, it starts leaking everywhere over some very, very expensive stuff in this building. And it was that same situation where I learned early on in my career that you fess up, say, "Hey, you know what? This is a bad batch out of the factory. We're going to fix it, whatever it costs, and if there's any damage to any of your inventory, we'll replace it." So I would say that would be the biggest one learning experience that I had was be able to fess up, just step up to the plate and fix the problem. It doesn't matter who did it, it's got to be fixed, so you can work that out later.
Allison Hambrick:
What advice do you have for young engineers and others who are considering a shift in their roles, perhaps from desk job to field job?
Matt Walters:
Yeah, Jonathan just touched on something really critical, and that's scope gap. It's a huge problem in construction. And just due to the nature, and it's totally understandable how this happens, I have a lot of empathy for my contractors I work with even now when they point the finger or try to say their main job, their North Star, their higher purpose goal ends up becoming, how do I make sure this is not my fault or not my job? What can I do to deflect responsibility? Because they're just buried and they're just trying to do the best they can with the constraints that they have. But I think really, if you want to stand out in the industry, if you make your scope of work to solve problems, you're going to have borders, you're going to have liabilities. And on the construction side especially, you do have to be careful of what you do and don't accept responsibility for, but you can always help without accepting responsibility. You can always guide. You can always advise.
There's been times where as a controls vendor, I've been out on an install site and I've seen the mechanical contractor struggling to install something or adjust something properly. And if I have the skill to do it, let me teach you something. Even if he doesn't work for my company, if it's something I can show you, I can teach another individual, whether it be an engineer, a commissioning agent, a mechanic, an electrician, whoever it is, and I can teach them in a couple of minutes on how to do it the right way and make them a better person, I absolutely want to do that. And just being with a person in the room, whether you're in a GC meeting or out in the field, who's willing to solve problems at all costs and is always looking to get to from point A to point B, again, being smart about not accepting undue liability, I think that really sets you apart.
Jonathan Smith:
The advice I'd have for the young engineers, this is actually one of the main points that I cover in my distinguished lecture. I titled it, I Chose the Non-traditional Engineering Career Path. Now What? And it is don't be afraid to go do something different if that's where your passion is because if you're doing something that you think, "Oh, this is boring. I don't see why did I go to school for this," there are so many options within the HVAC industry. Don't be afraid to do it. If you want to consider it and you think it's going to be fun and you've got the opportunity to do it, then do it. The worst thing that can happen is it doesn't go well for a couple of years and you try something different. That's the beauty of being in this industry, and Matt touched on this as well. There are so many different opportunities that you can do within this industry or maybe you get bored with what you're doing. If you're getting bored with it, go ahead and shift. There's nothing wrong with it. I've shifted three times in my career, and I don't regret any of it because it got me to where I'm at today. And I'd also say if they're considering a shift in their roles, go out and network with a lot of people. Utilize ASHRAE as a network for you to go out and meet more people that say, "Hey, maybe you ever thought about being a project manager? Some people may be on a construction side instead of being on the design side, or maybe you go work for a manufacturer and be an engineer in house or you're their person out in the field doing startups. You got to find what you love and go do it." So I would say don't hesitate to make the shift if that's what you really are wanting to do.
Matt Walters:
Yeah, that's something I echo, Jonathan, to a lot of the students I talk to in school. I say something like find a place to work that does a lot of different things because you really don't know what you like and what you're curious in until you get that exposure. Gaylord was after me being able to do mechanical, electrical, plumbing, carpentry, pools, HVAC, you name it. There's a lot of companies that do a lot of different things, even in construction. It can even be working alongsides or asking the drywaller next to what you're doing on a site that's like, "Hey, it looks interesting. What are you doing?" It doesn't even have to work for your company. Try. Just try things, be willing to help people. Something as simple as carrying a guy's bag of tools out to his car when he is tired at the end of a long day, he might teach you something. That's a big one.
Jonathan Smith:
Yeah. I like to say too is, what do I want to be when I grow up? I said that three or four times now in my career. I'm in the middle of that right now. What do I want to be when I grow up? And I'm 47 years old. So you'd be surprised your interests shift over your career on what you want to do and do not be afraid to make that shift happen because you'll be a better person for it.
Allison Hambrick:
That's amazing advice. I think anybody in any industry could stand to hear that.
Also, you've both kind of segued well into my next question, which is, can you elaborate more on the kinds of roles that exist for those who are not suited to desk jobs within the engineering industry?
Matt Walters:
As technology is becoming more pervasive, it grows exponentially, technological integration. I always think about the saying that you hear, they don't make it like they used to. But when I think back to the KitchenAid mixer my mother has from the 1940s that still works today, and I just think about how many—They probably had a decade where that was the new technology that they had to finally tune and hone in on that device into a well-oiled machine. The life cycle for technology today, one, maybe two years, and then you got to add another feature. When we look at stuff today that just breaks quickly, nobody's really had time to figure out how does this thing work and create it into that finely tuned machine before another feature gets added in that changes the way the feature they just added works now and they have to start over.
People in the field are so needed for these really technical and complex systems. And I would say even just something as simple as operating facilities, as we continue to move into the future, we're starting to need real engineers at some of these facilities, not just people who might be there for administrative stuff and happen to do filter changes or custodians that happen to do this other thing. We really need people who have dedicated training and education around how systems can be optimized in multiple fields of discipline. It's becoming really complex. So if you're somebody who really likes science and is interested in engineering, but you can't sit still, I mean, that's my problem, right? Buildings are just giant Legos now. There's so much cool technology and equipment and so many different strategies and ways to optimize systems for performance, for efficiency, for longevity, for asset management. There's a really endless subset of roles that you can do and take everything to the most granular, to the most intense degree that you can. If it's a curiosity that piques your interest, chase it down.
Jonathan Smith:
That's great advice there, man. I agree 100% with you, especially when it comes to things that are starting to go away and we don't have as many people that can work on them anymore. Things like pneumatic controls, they're still out there everywhere. You want job security? There it is. Go learn how to do that and do it really well, and you're out in the field a lot. Same thing with just if you're doing, say, a controls technician. I have a lot of friends who have engineering degrees, and they've been to controls, technicians their entire career, and now, they own a company that does that. So that's a career path for you to start out in the field and then you end up owning and employing a lot of people doing that same thing. So there are so many different things and I say daily, and I saw this when I was at Siemens and my job at HDR was to know this, was how fast the industry is changing and what roles are disappearing and appearing just as fast.
And you mentioned one to two years. You're spot on with that. Sometimes I'd say it's even faster. You get it installed, it's already outdated. So you need to know how to work on that. You need to know what's coming. So if you're in sales or you're in business development, you've got to be able to tell that owner, "Hey, it's going to take us three years to build this building." Say it's a state or a hospital or something very complex. We need to evaluate this a year out on, do we need to go with a different technology or do we need to continue with what we have because the last thing you want is something outdated installed right then and there. And there are jobs, there are people that is the only thing they do today, especially with the data centers and the big things like that. It's constantly evolving and constantly changing. So I guess the best advice I'd say is just pick the path you want to go down and just embrace it. And if you don't like that path, try a new one, right?
Matt Walters:
Absolutely. I always say I look at every job I take as a tool to teach myself a new skill. We don't know what type of engineers we're going to need five years from now. And the way we find out is somebody somewhere, an engineer at some company, sees a gap that's underserved, and maybe they have a curiosity around a thing, and there's really not a position for what they're trying to articulate or what they think is needed. You can just go invent your own job. If there's something that interests you and it's filling a gap and a need in the marketplace, in the company, in the business unit that you're at and you think that's going to be fun, give it a shot. Start taking on responsibility that's above and beyond the scope of your station and create what that new engineer is because right now, there's a need for a dozen niches that don't even have real title names yet that I can think of, and there's way more out there. You can discover those.
Allison Hambrick:
That's amazing. Thank you so much. We are coming up on the end of our time, but before we reach that goalpost, I wanted to ask if either of you have final parting thoughts.
Matt Walters:
Yes, I do. I always like to say a well-defined problem is a problem half solved. Our industry, like I mentioned earlier, our infrastructure, the built environment, it's becoming increasingly degraded. We have more and more deferred maintenance, and we need people to come help us solve these problems. I think things like ASHRAE Journal Podcast that we're talking about here, Mike Rowe’s Podcast, even my company McKinstry has just launched a podcast, Building What Matters, these types of conversations allow us to define the problem more specifically. When I'm in the field or when Jonathan's in an executive meeting, we both have our perspectives, and the industry landscape changes so fast. If I jump from one's part to another, let's say I jump up to executive, within five years, I have no idea what's going on in the field. So being able to have conversations like this, conversations from in the field and conversations from an executive or maybe even CEO level, hearing all of those perspectives allows us to get a really well and articulated and defined problem to solve. And I think through more conversations like this, and I really want to encourage other companies out there or other people in the industry to start having more conversations like this so that we can fix the problems of the future.
Jonathan Smith:
I would say from my end, do not be afraid to step outside the norm. Go ahead and do what you're passionate about and do it to the best of your ability. And if you fail, that's okay. Try again, do something different, but don't be afraid to ask questions. You're always learning in this industry. Just because you're at the executive level, that doesn't mean you stop asking questions because then, Matt said it, doesn't take long to get completely out of the loop. I know a lot of people that are in management that have no clue what goes on out in the field. Don't be afraid to step out in the field with some of your technicians occasionally or just go out there to a job site if you've been in management for a while because that's a lost art. Sometimes you get buried in the numbers all day and you forget about things, and then when someone comes to you with a problem, you have no idea what to do about it because you've been out of it so long. So just don't be afraid to step outside your norm and do something. And worst case scenario is it doesn't work and you try again, right? You're not going to lose your job. And even if you do, there's so many opportunities out there that lie ahead. It's just like, what do I want to do next? I think Matt said that as well. What do I want to learn next? You're always learning, so don't be afraid to ask those questions. I like to think don't suffer in silence. If you have a difference of opinion and it hasn't been said at the table already, you got to voice it. That's why you're there. That's why you're a professional. That's why you're there to ask those questions.
Matt Walters:
Yes, sir.
Allison Hambrick:
That's wonderful advice. And sometimes you'll learn a lot from those questions. Sometimes the people you were with learn from those questions. Maybe it's something they didn't consider. And a big theme of this conversation is the value of different types of experience. So working on a team, you bring all those experiences together and everybody learns. Everybody has something different to contribute. But on that note, we are out of time for today. So thank you both for joining us.
Jonathan Smith:
Thank you so much, Allison.
Allison Hambrick:
To our listeners, thank you for tuning in to this episode of ASHRAE Journal Podcast. The ASHRAE Journal podcast team is editor, Drew Champlin; managing editor, Linda Rathke; producer and associate editor, Allison Hambrick; assistant editor, Mary Sims; associate editor, Tani Palefski; technical editor, Rebecca Norris; and creative designer, Teresa Carboni.
Copyright ASHRAE. The views expressed in this podcast are those of individuals only and not of ASHRAE, its sponsors or advertisers. Please refer to ashrae.org/podcast for the full disclaimer.