There’s never been a dull moment since Adrian Conrad joined Smiths from university.
He’d studied mechanical engineering and leapt at the chance to join John Crane as a travelling support engineer covering customers throughout the US.
The rare opportunity to work closely with enormously experienced and knowledgeable reliability and sales engineers, to gain exposure to multiple end-user customers, and to travel right across North America, gave his fledgeling career wings.
When he finally settled, he spent a few years at John Crane’s New Orleans site as a customer reliability engineer, before taking on a similar role in the US Virgin Islands.
From there, he relocated to Chicago to work within the company’s global engineering team and took over developing, and later managing, John Crane’s ‘engineeringU’ Accelerated Development Programme.
Nurturing talent
This programme is designed to attract, develop and retain highly talented engineers entering the industry out of university, and Adrian loved having the opportunity to ‘give back’, helping to recruit, inspire and develop the next generation of ‘pioneers of progress’ as others had done for him.
He said, ‘I got a particular buzz from watching those young engineers test their limits, discover their talents and begin to realise how they, too, could positively impact the world through their ideas and innovations.’
Positive change is something he, himself, has been pursuing in his latest role. As digital product manager, he’s working with the John Crane Sense® Turbo remote diagnostic tool, a breakthrough in industrial plant monitoring which essentially gives operators ‘digital eyes’ on the performance and health of their industrial assets, thereby enabling them to optimise usage, extend time between repairs and eliminate unplanned downtime.
Digital transformation
Adrian says that being part of a team that is striving to advance the digital transformation of the energy industry, with customers who are at the forefront of a mission as critical as clean energy transition, is what keeps him sharp and stimulated at work ‘each and every day’.
He also credits his unwavering passion to the company’s proactivity in progressing his technical knowledge, as well as his management skills through engaging leadership development programmes.
Together, this has enabled him to seize leadership opportunities as they’ve come his way, such as his current role which involves directing and motivating others to innovate new products for the Sense digital product portfolio.
He says, ‘At Smiths, you never know what the next challenge will be, but you know it will be exciting – and that’s what keeps our passion for what we do alive.’
