Ep. 17: Operations mgr Erin Cuellar moved between five states in 13 years for manufacturing career

Chinatown 2.0

Erin Cuellar is Director of Operations at STERIS, a manufacturer of medical devices. At the time of the interview, she was senior operations manager at the same company, and her role was essentially that of a plant manager.

Her responsibilities included supervising teams, managing KPIs, and maintaining quality controls.

Erin comes from a very different world than I do. She dropped out of college, worked at a local manufacturing site, joined an apprenticeship program, got her journeyman’s card which is sort of like a full license to practice in the trades, and moved from state to state for employment in manufacturing.

In the course of 13 years, she moved between five different states. At least one of the moves was the result of a plant shutdown thanks to outsourcing.

But Erin and her family, which includes a husband and three children were fully resilient in transitioning to new homes, new jobs, and new schools.

In fact, about a year after our interview, Erin moved to Pennsylvania to become Director of Operations at her company. I became interested in the trades in recent years after noticing and following the works of Mike Rowe and Andrew Yang, who both highlight a change in the mix of American jobs available as well as people willing to undertake those jobs.

In the US, there just seem to be fewer opportunities in the trades sector, and even fewer young people looking to enter those fields.

Mike Rowe looks to encourage the youths to get into these areas, whereas Andrew Yang sees the loss of these opportunities as the force that hollowed out middle America, which disenfranchised large swaths of the population, leading to rising support for the wings of the political spectrum.

In today’s conversation, Erin and I talked about what it's like to work in a manufacturing plant, her experience of working in the trades as a rare species of a woman, her moves around the country in pursuit of various manufacturing jobs, how does she think about raising her kids, and why she thinks it's a good idea for young people to consider a career in the trades.