Experience
“The most satisfying days are when a client comes to you and says, ‘We’ve had this problem for five years and haven’t been able to solve it,’ and then we fix the problem and the client says, ‘How did you do that?’”
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Culture
“I enjoy coming to work every day and going to the job sites. It’s an atmosphere where everyone’s there to produce a good product, and everyone works together. What gets me up in the morning are the technical challenges and the people. We sit according to business unit in an open floor plan, and the healthcare group is probably the loudest. We’re always having conversations over cube walls: ‘What do you think of this challenge?’ ‘What did you do here?’ The great thing about working at Dunham is that if you have a problem, there’s always someone you can talk to who has the relevant experience.
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Challenges
“I’ve worked in healthcare my entire career at Dunham, and because we’ve built a good client base in that industry, there’s a lot of mutual respect. In healthcare, as in most any industry, no one wants to have to replace equipment after a couple of years. They want reliability and ease of operation—to not be dealing with problems. Everything has to work perfectly on day one, with minimal upkeep, while saving energy. And that’s always a good challenge.”
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Leadership
“When I came out of school, I didn’t know anything about the business. So my expectations of people coming up in the industry is that they don’t know a lot about our business, but that they’re driven and willing to learn. We have an excellent formal mentorship program, but then there’s a high level of day-to-day mentoring. It’s great to always have someone who’s ‘been there,’ and it’s especially nice for the younger engineers to have someone whose been in their shoes—not only when it comes to a project, but with their career.”
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Why Dunham?
“After I graduated in engineering from Purdue, I joined a Minneapolis firm that my uncle worked at. When that closed, I followed someone from that firm over to Dunham. Then as now, the people at Dunham are laid back, easy-going and hard-working but like to have fun. You get to work with clients you respect, who trust and respect you, and who truly value your input.”