I got in yesterday from my trip to Minot, on schedule and with all the data we needed. We managed to work around the NORI – Nuclear Operations Readiness Inspection – and got access to all the sites.

I stopped by the office to drop off equipment and talk to my supervisor before he leaves tomorrow for two weeks in Guam, and met our new hire. Later, talking to Pat, I found out that he had been authorized to hire four new engineers. So if you’re in cathodic protection – hell, even if you’re a newly minted engineer or materials science grad and are interested – you like about a 50-50 mix of working in the field and writing reports/design, want to travel, and live in or are willing to relocate to San Diego, California, then contact me and I’ll pass it on. As I’ve written before, we’re not getting enough people into this field, and it has a strong demand, steady growth, good job security, and for those interested, it’s pretty easy to start working for yourself after you put in some years and gotten a few certifications. It seems that every corrosion engineer I’ve met has a different story about how he or she got into it (and we need a lot more shes). Nobody ever seems to have planned on becoming a corrosion engineer, but the job is so varied and interesting that we lose few after we’ve gotten you hooked.

Posted by Greg as Corrosion Control at 06:57 PST

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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 as Corrosion Control at 00:43 PST

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So what can you say after not posting for almost a month? I guess after a couple of weeks you just have to wait for the impulse to find something momentous to die off, and when you get the chance, post. Right now I’m in a hotel room in Shiloh, Illinois, and tomorrow I’ll start working on the cathodic protection on the fuel systems at Scott Air Force Base.

It’s been a busy month. I’ve tried changing my work schedule to start working at 6:00 am so I can be home by 3:00 pm, and it’s really been kicking my butt. The quiet time at the end of the day, when the baby has gone to sleep, is now gone, because I usually fall asleep right along with him. I used to get some writing in then. Plus, at work I’ve cranked out a series of rush-rush reports and gotten into another job that took whatever spare time I did have at the computer – yes, I’m actually coding on the job! We’re making a database of cathodic protection systems for a client with a small municipal water system, and I’m writing the VBA code for the interface.

I’ve also had a round of doctor’s appointments to go to, which means making up more time lost. This month is the fifth anniversary of my diagnosis of Stage III malignant melanoma, and I’m getting some pretty complete checkups to assess how I’m doing. Considering that a Stage III only has a 60% chance of surviving five years, I’ve already done well, but I’ll hold off on the real relief until I get the PET scan results back.

Well, I’m back, but I’m not going to push it. See you around.

Posted by Greg as Corrosion Control, Melanoma, Posts About Me at 16:19 PST

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I have an upcoming trip to Savannah, Georgia. I’ll be flying out on September 11 (gulp!) and spending a week assessing the cathodic protection on the fuel systems at Hunter Army Airfield, home to the Aviation Brigade of 3rd ID, 1/75th Rangers, 3/160th SOAR and a Coast Guard Air Station, among others.

It was awkward trying to book a flight out – not because of the forboding anniversary, but because I don’t want to miss the opening season game of the San Diego Chargers against the Dallas Cowboys. Since my favorite airline is American (that extra two inches in coach is a really big deal for my long legs), I was able to book a connection through DFW and got a 3 hour plus lay-over. I’ll miss perhaps the first 15 minutes, but I figure just about every tv in the terminal will be tuned to the game. I tried booking a combination with an even longer lay-over – there was a SAN-DFW leg that got in an hour earlier, but would you believe it, it cost $190 more! That put me over my travel budget. Oh well, I’d rather miss the beginning than the end, even if it means I won’t get in to Savannah until after 10:00 pm. I just have to hope that the game doesn’t go into overtime.

I’ve booked a hotel with high speed internet access – wifi, not hard-wired, unfortunately; so I ought to be able to keep up with my blog while I’m away. I’ll have to bring a copy of Knoppix if I want to use Linux, though – the company really frowns on installing other OS’s on their laptops. Hmmm – would they be able to tell? They use AssetMetrix for monitoring our machines. I’m looking at the report for my desktop – I think the IT Department have given up any hope of keeping me under control, and they gave me a copy of my report when I asked. I see that AM detected the two NTFS partitions on my hard drive, but would they sense a ext3 partition? Windows doesn’t seem to.

Well, nix that idea- there’s only 1.6 GB free on the laptop I’m bringing.

Posted by Greg as Corrosion Control, Football, OS at 13:49 PST

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