Four hundred of 700 employees at Toledo, Ohio’s GPRS (which stands for Ground Penetrating Radar Systems) are in the field. They are pushing or carrying ground penetrating radar units and searching for unseen obstacles that contractors dearly want to avoid finding with their buckets and drill bits.
However, they’re also interacting with clients, sending reports to them and negotiating with them to land additional work assignments. These field personnel are the face of the company, with enough clout on a job site to propose and close a deal.
They’re called project managers, rather than techs. The question is, are they blue-collar or white-collar employees?
“I’ve never thought about categorizing them one way or the other,” says Jamie Althauser, who directs field support for GPRS. Because he started in the field, he brings personnel perspective to the question.
“I loved being in the field. You get dirty and work hard in sometimes very cold conditions. The work is very blue-collar,” he says. “But if a field person is going to be good at the job, the person also needs to be good at building relationships with clients and at writing reports. We look for well-rounded and well-spoken and educated individuals to be our project managers.”
Whether they are blue-collar or white-collar workers, they indeed work hard, including wrestling with equipment on sometimes challenging job sites. It follows that the field personnel must be physically agile.
However, the company is constantly adding new services to the lineup — such as drone imaging and leak detection — and those tasks can be physically less demanding. GPRS sees them as a means to retain human assets.
“All of the services we have added in the last three years — camera work, leak detection and so on — can extend the career of our employees by getting them off their knees to, say, just holding a microphone and listening for leaks in a pipe.”
There are not a lot of examples yet of people switching over because the services are relatively new, but it’s a viable option. “It is happening more and more as we extend the career path of our project managers.” Read more about GPRS in this month’s issue of Dig Different magazine.
