Empower innovation and advance industry leadership

Heather Graves

Staff

December 16, 2024

OSHKOSH – The future of Oshkosh Corporation, Jennifer Valentine – engineering talent programs manager – said, is in innovation.

It’s the company’s focus on innovation, Valentine said, that prompted the launch of Oshkosh Corporation’s Technical Fellow Program – a new initiative designed to recognize and empower the company’s top technical engineering talent.

“As we navigate a rapidly evolving technological landscape, it’s crucial that we foster an environment where our technical leaders can innovate and explore new frontiers,” Jay Iyengar, executive vice president and chief technology and strategic sourcing officer at Oshkosh Corporation, said. “The Technical Fellow Program not only highlights the exceptional contributions of our top engineers but also reinforces our commitment to providing the tools and opportunities for innovation across the organization, to deliver solutions that will move the industries we serve forward.”

Getting started

Valentine said she brought the first draft of the fellow program idea to Iyengar during her first week on the job.

“As we started talking about focusing more on innovation and the future of our organization, a tech fellow program was an obvious add to our technical career path for our engineers,” she said. “So we did benchmarking across our industry, looked at other organizations that have a technical fellow program and created one that was right for Oshkosh.”

Though other organizations have publicly shared their technical fellow program details for guidance, Valentine said it was important for Oshkosh to create the program based around what the corporation itself needed.

“Looking at Oshkosh and what we needed was a combined effort of all of our engineering leaders and our CPO to say, ‘Where do we need this level of technical expertise in our organization, and what can they do for us?’” she said. “Asking ourselves, ‘How can they catapult us (from) where we are today into this innovation technology space that we want to be in?’”

Launching the Technical Fellow Program, Valentine said, started with “an extremely thorough vetting progress.”

Candidates, she said, undergo an achievement review, participate in interviews with the Technology Leadership Team and deliver a strategy presentation to the Oshkosh Technology Committee.

Prospective candidates, Valentine said, self-nominate, prepare an application packet and submit their qualifications to the program manager.

The nuts and bolts

The program’s first cohort of fellows, Valentine said, encompass a wide variety of areas of the company.

“Each applicant brings along with them their area of expertise,” she said. “So if their career has given them opportunities to gain expertise in, let’s say electrification, that’s what they’re bringing – that is the depth of what their expertise is in.”

However, Valentine said Oshkosh Corporation does have a list of domains it has identified as an organization that are aligned with the company’s future strategy, providing more depth of knowledge in those areas.

“Fellows in those areas can look forward, where our engineers are working on today’s projects and today’s issues,” she said. “These technical fellows will look forward to where the industry is going in their area of expertise, in their domain.”

In turn, Valentine said fellows will be able to help prepare Oshkosh Corporation to be ready for those changes.

The company’s inaugural cohort of fellows include:

• Louis Bafile, for his contributions to Access vehicle systems.
• Steve Nestel, for his advancements in systems engineering.
• Tim Snyder, for his expertise in Defense vehicle systems.
• Dave Steinberger, for his leadership in electrification systems.

Before the Technical Fellow Program was launched, Valentine said there were goals set for how many fellows the organization would like to have.

“But those goals were set without the understanding of what this would actually mean for our organization, so I think they were more aspirational,” she said. “But we are committing to evaluating candidates three times a year.”

During the application process, Valentine said candidates will receive feedback and “they’ll either go back and continue to develop in their areas in which we’ve identified (they need work in) or they’ll move into the Technical Fellow Program.”

“We have four now, and every year we will go through the same process three times,” she said. “Maybe we’ll have one candidate (that moves forward), maybe we’ll have three. And maybe by the end of next year – though we (originally) had higher goals – we’ll have six or seven.”

‘Career positions’

The Technical Fellow Program positions, Valentine said, “are career positions.”

“We believe that in order to be in a technical fellow space, you have to have had a significant level of contribution to the organization – for instance, if it was an external candidate, a significant level of contribution to the industry,” she said. “This could be your final position.”

Though there are obviously opportunities for tech fellows to move into higher-level leadership roles, Valentine said “we’re okay with people focusing on this type of position for the rest of their careers – because it is always going to be future-focused.”

“It is always going to be different,” she said. “There’s an opportunity to be satisfied for quite some time.”

A win-win-win

Valentine said in order for Oshkosh Corporation to continue being innovative and hold its own in the innovation world, “we need people in these positions that are going to continue to look to the future.”

“It really sets us apart from our competitors that we are going to invest in that technical career path and in turn invest in innovation,” she said.

Though only fellows for a handful of weeks and still in the process of fully transitioning from their former positions into the positions within the program, Valentine said the company’s first cohort of fellows are already sharing their excitement about their roles with others within the company.

“The (rest of the company) have heard about people entering these roles, but they haven’t seen them working yet,” she said. “But we have been doing everything we can to recognize these technical fellows at every opportunity we can. I think in the next year, as they start to put themselves out there, start to educate the organization and get into the spotlight within the organization, we will see more reactions.”

As a company comprised of 12 segments –  JLG®, Pierce®, MAXIMETAL, Oshkosh® S-Series™, Oshkosh® Defense, McNeilus®, IMT®, Jerr-Dan®, Frontline™ Communications, Oshkosh® Airport Products, Oshkosh AeroTech™ and Pratt Miller – Tim Gilman, senior manager of public relations and branding, said Oshkosh Corporation is uniquely positioned to have a ripple effect with innovation throughout the company.

“We’re able to design and manufacture technology that we can then spread out to all of these different end markets,” he said. “That is a big piece of what these tech fellows will do as well – take their expertise and spread that out to other areas of the company.”

Gilman said that is one of the unique aspects of Oshkosh Corporation – “we can develop one (type of) technology and use it in 12 different end markets.”

“I actually met with our tech fellows recently and they were talking specifically about how a fellow in one segment is grabbing another tech fellow from another segment and partnering together on a project,” he said.

Being able to combine the expertise of tech fellows from two different segments, Valentine said, is “one of the great powers of Oshkosh Corporation.”

“We’re uniquely positioned to push the boundaries of innovation across a wide range of industries,” she said, “and with the Technical Fellow Program, we’re basically going to accelerate that process.”

More information about Oshkosh Corporation’s Technical Fellows Program can be found at oshkoshcorp.com.