Time for change

May 3rd will be my last day working for The Woodbridge group as a Product Evaluation and Costing Technologist. I spent 2 years and 4 months learning the operations of a chemical company that produced foam for the automotive industry and felt that I have learned all I could and figured it was time to part ways and pursue other opportunities.

I have been extremely grateful for the opportunity and the ability to work alongside many individuals at The Woodbridge Group. I’ve learned to work with many different business units including the product engineers, tooling managers, purchasing commodity managers, the pricing and commercial team.

I have learned the skills to collaborate in team environments and find effective solutions to current problems and meet very tight deadlines from customer demands. My objectives were to maintain my automotive programs and provide up to date costs for chemicals, bill of materials for foam seats as well as costing new businesses.

My programs included OEMs such as Chrysler, Nissan and Ford. A large portion of my day goes to slicing 3D data using Teamcenter VisView, reading 2D blueprints of car seats and making sure they are costed according to our standards and specifications to ensure manufacturing feasibility.

Initially, when I started 2 years ago, I felt a bit of impostor syndrome. As someone who did not have an engineering or financial degree, I was nervous taking on a job description that had nothing to do with my background in sciences. But they felt that my skill set would be a great fit to the position based on my previous experience at their manufacturing plant in R&D.

I believe that having an open mind and the ability to learn was what made me excel in my position regardless of my degree. It took me a full year to finally grasp my job title and understand my position at my company.

During my first year I saw a lot of opportunities to improve their process. I’ve made many improvements with Excel macros alone which saved the company over $4500 yearly. The second year was spent on improving my ability to meet tight deadlines and was now finally comfortable working in my position.

Unfortunately, being comfortable meant plateauing and I was no longer learning anything new. Manufacturing was not something I wanted to do long term and ultimately made the decision to resign.

I wanted to spend more time on programming. I was making progress but I realized the energy and time I had was very limited with a full-time job . I knew that commitment to change requires 100% focus and gave ample time in my notice to allow my manager to find a replacement.

Being in my 20's and still having the energy to learn was something I wanted to capitalize on. I would program on the side to develop new skills and eventually automate a part of my job.

I found that being able to develop something to solve a problem was a lot more fun which eventually sparked my interest in programming.

Now that I am no longer working, having more free time enables me to work towards developing my skills in programming and learning various languages that will help develop my new career path.