Food Technician Operating Equipment

Episode 30: Every Day Is Different for a Food Technician

Carl Benttine, Senior Electronics Technician at Hormel Foods
September | 18:37
Episode 30 Transcript, Show Notes, and Podcast Feedback Survey

In this episode, Mike talks with Carl Benttine, a Senior Electronics Technician at Hormel Foods. Carl shares his educational and workforce journey, in which he gained a variety of electromechanical, programming and troubleshooting skills that have led to a long career.

[I] started as a union technician, working on the floor, on all the equipment. And with my skills I got from my local community college, I was able to move up very rapidly into what they considered was an Office Tech position. That’s where I maintained the PLCs, the touchscreens, a lot of the processes, write programs, and help troubleshoot. I had the opportunity to move into our Engineering group. We have a group of engineers and other people like myself that…we just build our own equipment.

The diversity of the job tasks assigned to a technician at a food processing facility changes very rapidly. They need to be multi-skilled and agile. Fortunately, there is usually a lot of on-the-job training to help them keep up to date.

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