Personal Narrative: A Career In The Workplace

I spoke with my father Tom Ryan who spent the past forty years working as a

electrician in the electrical maintenance field. My father has worked for three companies

in his career; Combustion Engineering, U.S. Pipe, and Erlanger Hospital as a

maintenance electrician. Combustion Engineering and U.S. Pipe was very traditional in

their work environment where most of the trade and production work was done by men

and the support staff and office positions was more diverse between men and women.

Erlanger is very diverse in their work positions with men and women working side by

side, however in the maintenance department it still follows the all male traditional roles

for trade jobs. People working at Combustion Engineering and U.S.
Thirty or forty years ago people worked for

the same company their whole career and often worked in the same position that they

were originally hired for. The work did not change much and people seemed to enjoy

doing the same thing everyday year after year. Most companies have moved away from

the pension retirement plan and now offer 401k that makes their retirement much more

portable from one job to the other. This change has changed the way employees view

their company because it does not cost them anything when they go from job to job with

little interference to their retirement benefits. Another change that has come recently in

the maintenance industry is where companies have contracted out many jobs and in some

cases whole departments. Job security has suffered because the contracting company is

solely dependent of the contract with the company. My father feels like the future will be

much more fluid with people changing jobs constantly and very little loyalty to their

company. Technology also plays a role in the constant turnover in employment as

technology advances it makes some jobs obsolete and those employees must become

educated in a different field. The end result is a constant