Manager, research and development (R&D) for the home healthcare group within a medical device company
New Jersey, USA
What I Do
I am responsible for the team of people who design and develop home healthcare products and their packaging components. We do product development for products including bandages, athletic and therapeutic braces,
and thermometers. Although some of the actual manufacturing is done in house, we outsource a significant amount of the products.
I am in meetings about 50 percent of the time, with a variety of people, including project teams, other R&D people, and marketing and market research staff. I attend some tradeshows and supplier visits, and I travel as I determine necessary, which is about 20 percent of the time. Email is a big part of my life; I spend around 20 percent of my time emailing between the groups I meet with and with the sales representatives who have questions about packaging or customers (for example, retailers selling home healthcare need to know dimensions and materials, etc.) I spend at least 10 percent of my time on personnel issues with seven of my direct reports, who are scientists and engineers.
Currently we have an SAP implementation under way company-wide—I am the contact for the data for the packaging area, so that's an ongoing project taking a lot of my time.
What I Enjoy Most
The completion of a new product and/or new packaging is quite thrilling. I love to finish something and then see what I have helped to create for sale on the retail shelves. I can say, “We did that.”
What I Enjoy Least
I deal with the minutiae of creating specifications. It is standard for most engineering-related professionals to write their own technical specifications—it’s the making and knowing that is fun, not the documenting part.
Why I Chose This Career
I have always loved taking things apart, discovering how they work and figuring out how to put them back together—that is, reverse engineering. In addition, I have always had an interest in medicine, but not enough to want to go to medical school followed by residency. Instead I’ve been able to combine two interests into a career developing medical products.
Desirable Traits to Be Successful in This Career
For R&D management, you need creativity, attention to detail, a willingness to see things from other viewpoints, good people skills for the team product development approach, and an understanding of the need for accurate and honest timelines.
In order to move up past middle management, I believe that you also need to see the financial and strategic impacts of everything you do. The MBA is changing how I look at things—especially the financial considerations I hadn’t been exposed to before within R&D. I now have new methods for analysis, so I don’t have to rely so much on the internal people. If I do, I am better equipped to interpret what they are telling me.
Words of Advice If You Are Considering This Career Path
My advice is to be flexible and keep your options open—avoid becoming pigeon-holed as just an engineer or just a one-technology wonder. Stay up-to-date on the latest technologies, and always look for new things to learn to expand your skill set. The MBA for me was my most recent effort to broaden my skills so I am a well-rounded manager of R&D and a prospective manager in a broader context.
What I Did Before This (Including Pre-MBA and Post-MBA Jobs)
I have always been in product development. I started as an entry-level engineer right after college and have progressed into management. I spent four years in my first job at a small company, engineering feeding tubes. Because of the smaller size, I got exposure as a development engineer to quality assurance (QA), [and got experience in] regulatory issues in manufacturing, and even some marketing.
Then I came to my current company, starting as a development engineer on some needle products in the consumer division. Then, with the opportunities afforded by being part of a large, global company, I moved to the sample collection business as QA engineer and then to the safety technology division, doing new business development. Eventually, I returned to the consumer division in my current R&D management role. I have been with this company 13 years now.
About 15 years into my career, I knew I wanted an MBA to enhance my established career. But my career was advanced enough and my family life complicated enough (with two kids and a spouse also getting a part-time MBA), that a full-time MBA program didn’t make sense for me. An interactive MBA degree with a lot of opportunity for self-study made the most sense for my situation. It enabled me to get the degree within a few years, while maintaining my job and industry presence—an important consideration in technical professions, where it may be unwise to be out of the technology loop for a two-year period of time. The MBA has not changed my responsibilities much yet, since I just finished a few months ago. However, the courses of study helped me learn how to do things differently along the way, especially with regard to how I view financial feasibility and reasoning for decision making.
Educational Background (Undergraduate, MBA, Other)
MBA, Syracuse University School of Management, interactive/independent study, 2002
Master of science, New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, New Jersey), engineering management, 1991
Bachelor of science, New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, New Jersey), mechanical engineering, 1987
In MBA Programs, I'd Suggest You Look For...
A reputable school with a program that fits your own lifestyle—weekend, executive programs and interactive, distance-learning courses were the only considerations I had because of my work and family obligations.
When I looked at distance learning or interactive MBAs, I did a search and, surprisingly, found a lot of options. However, I wanted a school with a good reputation in its overall MBA offering; I thought this was really important if I was already doing the nontraditional thing in terms of type of MBA study. The real knock-out factor for me, however, was that some of the established interactive MBA programs required an international residency, which would’ve been impossible for me. I had a husband doing a part-time evening MBA program already (the traditional long way!) and children at home in the evenings who needed at least one of us there at night. I needed to find a way to do this with all these constraints.
To get the most out of the MBA experience, I thought the residency was so important for networking with classmates, and I found that at Syracuse. Every semester, there’s a week of attending classes and meeting all the people. I met
five classmates who came from overseas (there may have been more that I didn’t get a chance to meet), although most were North America-ased. In total, I had three weeks of residency over three semesters and took two and a half years to finish my MBA. I needed that support network because I often emailed classmates and professors.
Don’t overlook the need for the support of your employer, whether financial support or simply cooperation for the times you have to miss work to attend classes. My company paid tuition, which was enormously helpful, and I believe they will benefit from my new skill set, as well. They also enabled me to have the time off for the residency without having to use personal vacation time. With school and work, I needed vacation, too! In order to accomplish this, I made myself available for conference calls when I wasn’t in class, I provided everyone with my cell phone number, and I checked emails regularly.
If you are considering distance learning, I will give three other tips:
I don’t think it would be a good idea for candidates wanting to entirely switch careers. There is no career transition training or support, and your network with the school is more limited by design.
I found that, for me, learning accounting from a distance was one of the more challenging courses, so I’d recommend a local course in something you know will be difficult for you before doing the distance, master’s level course.
I encourage you to really consider how you learn best. I am an engineer and tinkerer by nature—I learn well if someone gives me a book and lets me figure things out mostly on my own. Conversely, my husband, who is still in his part-time MBA program at Rutgers, felt that he needed the constant interaction of being in class, so he decided to get an MBA over four years, one or two classes at a time. The fact is that I don’t like sitting in class all the time, yet I had professors and classmates readily available for when I needed help. So, Syracuse made my interest in an MBA a reality through the interactive degree program.
