We Value Learning

So, my career path kind of began just, watching my dad go to and from work, wondering what he was doing. I can't remember how old I was, but I went to one of the to take your kids to workdays. I thought it was fascinating—seeing all the manufacturing here. And then probably eight years later or so, I got hired here in powder coat, worked my way through there and then the opportunity to work in the machine shop came. All I knew how to run at the time was a drill press. That's it. And I just learned from the ground up through hands-on training, which was excellent—how to run all the CNCs, and now I can run all 11 CNCs we have here. So, kind of where this idea of building stuff with my hands came from Legos. I just loved playing with Legos. 

I would sit in my room for like 10 hours a day. Just build and build and build. Wanting to create and form and machining is just a natural like extension of that. I love working with engineers, whenever they ask how can we machine this better, or do something like this. It gives us a lot of ways to be creative and say, hey, I think we can speed up the cycle times here by just one second. But that one second per part adds up to be hours or days at the end of the year in our machine shop. So it's opportunities like that that keeps me looking, keeps me interested in the machining. I take pride in my work because A-dec is a premium manufacturer of dental equipment. That premium name kind of starts in the machine shop. That really makes us stand out from our competitors and that's why I'm proud of what I do. Because I make us stand out from our competitors. If you're interested in machining here at A-dec, it's an awesome opportunity because A-dec has so many different types of machines. So many different departments that you can go to and learn and train in. And so many people that are willing to train you hands-on. That's a big difference I see from other companies. A-dec has this family-oriented mentality where people want to train others, build them up, and that's awesome.