I originally wrote this as a response to someone else’s comment, but it won’t get much exposure there, and I kinda like it, so here we go:

If you’re looking for some sort of insider evaluation of Corrpro Companies, Inc. as a potential investment, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m just not qualified to speculate, and even if I had information not available to the public, do you think I could reveal it, or even the willingness to reveal it, on a publicly-accessible website with my name emblazoned all over it?

I can talk about my perspective on the corrosion control industry in general, which is very positive towards growth. Thanks to increasing awareness, more stringent regulations and enforcement, a significantly aging US infrastructure, and the patently obvious fact that maintaining structures is generally cheaper than the capital investment involved in replacing them, corrosion control seems to be breaking free of its previously relegated role of routine, and deferrable, maintenance, and ascending to the forefront of long term, strategic investment. In that regard, Corrpro, with its size, talent pool, experience and established contacts, ought to do well.

However, I and others have been starting to notice that there is more work piling up than there are corrosion engineers to deal with it. We’re talking about an extremely complex process in scientific and engineering terms, and I haven’t seen any great push from the academic community to propel talented young engineers into this field. Hell, the few states that issued PE licenses in Corrosion Engineering quit doing so just a couple of years ago, and despite the gains that NACE has made in making their education and certification programs more rigorous, a NACE certification still does not hold the same prestige as other engineering credentials, which makes corrosion a less attractive career for new blood.

So we’re starting to feel a crunch in talent. It takes at least three years to turn an engineering or materials science graduate into a capable field engineer and more than five to produce an insightful technician. To interpret the results of their work, and to spot the anomalies that could lead to serious problems, requires ten or twelve years of experience, if not a couple of decades, and although the market has grown, I’m not seeing people enter the field in greater numbers than before.

This is going to lead to a real crunch. Hopefully, we in the industry can keep ahead of the curve through outreach and advances in technology, both in detection and remediation, but if we have to resort to slapping standard answers on all the problems we encounter, the exceptions, which could be disastrous, will turn around and bite us in the ass. People can die when we screw up, and the public won’t tolerate that – not that they should.

With a limited pool of qualified personnel, companies are going to encounter a lot more problems than strategic business planning and clawing for market share. If internal conditions grew too bad at a largish corrosion control company (and I really mean that in an unspecified way – it’s not a dig at my employer), management could come in one day and realize that they’ve lost half their critical personnel and can’t fulfill their contracts.

So if you’re looking for an interesting, even challenging, career, with good potential for steady advancement if you want to apply yourself, and excellent opportunities for starting your own company, by all means, jump into corrosion. If you want to sink what’s left over from your grocery money into a quick-get-rich opportunity, I’d suggest starting a private law enforcement company over in Iraq.

Posted by Greg in Corrosion Control

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