Jacob’s Ladder : A treatise on the transition from security technician to engineer

By Baer Halvorson, Security Systems Engineer at Kenton Brothers

Twelve years ago, I ordered an online locksmithing school from Foley-Belsaw Company and started smoke-marking keys in the garage to practice impressioning by hand. Now I look at 3 monitors and use architectural software and project management/bidding software to engineer and detail projects, that can range upwards of half a million dollars.

Seventy percent of my career has been spent as a technician, and in that time it is clear that there are a handful of techs that intend to do more. You get life-long technicians that are good at what they do and get everything they need from that work, but a good handful want more from their career. More money, more experience, more purpose and to be more renown in the industry. All considerable things to shoot for and one way to accomplish that is making the jump from the role of a technician to an engineer. While that’s easy to write for this blog, it’s far more nuanced to accomplish. My experience is one in a sea of a thousand, but from it we can draw a few nuggets of wisdom that I hope detail to technicians how doable it truly is.

The Story of Jacob’s Ladder

I am not a religious person, but there is this image in the Hebrew Torah that I get in my head when I think of transition as a whole. There’s this real old story where a man named Jacob is on the run from his brother. He had kind of done his brother ‘dirty’ and stolen his inheritance, but it happens. While on the run, he ends up in this far off land and he lays down to rest. He rests his head on this stone and while he’s sleeping he dreams of this scene, where looking out over the land he sees this insanely tall ladder from the ground into the heavens where angels are going up and down it. He wakes up in that moment with this pressing sense that where he is and what he must do is his destiny. He blesses the stone he dreamed upon and sets it up as a monument to this major moment in his life.

The reason that I adore this image is because while it’s specific to Jacob’s story, it is also broad and interpretive to what we must do as individuals when we are looking to transition in our careers. This microcosm has these nuggets of wisdom hidden within this story that I feel apply directly to us advancing our careers. Three things I pull from this story and that I saw in my transition from locksmith, to electrical security technician, to security engineer are drawn out of the dream, the image and the action.

The Dream

In working with numerous technicians, one of the hardest challenges for the tech is to dream. It’s easy to fall into a position or a company that is constantly full of work, and you get in this cycle of working for the weekends. Punch in, punch out, get paid. This cycle leads to no ambition, no purpose, a pay cap and a droning on of being plugged in to devices, a couple of family vacations becoming the highlight reel to your life and you spend your days counting the hours until Friday evening beers. Then you die.

If you run away from this though, and lay your head down to rest (preferably not stealing any inheritances) then you can start to dream. What purpose do you want to serve? Where do you want to be in 10 years with your career? What governments do you want to work with? What committees do you want to be on? What types of buildings do you want to secure? What technologies do you want to know about? Do you want them to call you an expert? Do you want to be a powerhouse locally, nationally, globally?

These and 100 other questions that will get you more out of life and help you get to the end feeling wonderful about the wild ride you were on! It all starts with getting away from the distractions and dreaming where you want to go. You must dream.

You can’t really live if you can’t dream.

The Image

The second facet of Jacob’s story is the image he sees in his dream. I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of different people in my twelve years. I’ve known technicians that are better at engineering solutions than engineers; I’ve worked with engineers that could easily jump back into the field and outperform lead technicians. I’ve known technicians that were better at managing a job than their project manager peers, and engineers that could sell better than the sales team could.

After seeing enough of this, one starts to understand that there is no hierarchy to the image of the ladder that Jacob saw the angels go up and down on. The take-away here is that you must not focus on comparison. For comparison is the thief of joy and part of finding your purpose in this industry is enjoying the journey that it takes. You must only worry about what YOU know, what YOU can do, and how WELL you can do it.

During the task at hand, the dream must live in the peripheral. This is a higher view that leads you to start becoming a better tech. Learn this device, wire that panel more cleanly than the last time, install the strike better than the last one you put in. You must commit to self-growth or you will get caught up in a manager not promoting you, a weekly meeting not acknowledging your effort or an install going south; all things that will happen, but they won’t matter when you realize that in all situations you learned and grew and are now better for it.

Continuing to use Jacob’s ladder as a metaphor, there’s a part in the story as Jacob is seeing this giant ladder ascending into heaven, he hears a voice tell him his destiny. It tells him that he will spread West, East, North and South and in his lineage all those after him will be blessed.

As a technician, you begin to bring the most value to your career when you are the widest spread in your knowledge. The security industry pulls from many surrounding industries in the electrical and low voltage fields. From knowing A/V when it comes to cameras and sound, to electrician knowledge in relay logic, to networking and wireless networks for connecting systems; the security technician needs to know a lot of aspects of the install. To be a valuable engineer, you must use the information you need in the field and begin to raise it higher and understand the concepts from a broader level. Understanding how these concepts play and interact with surrounding systems in the average environment. West, East, North and South; you must learn and be broad in your knowledge, so that when you are only given a small amount of information (photos, site walk notes, customer scope) you can expand that to designing an entire project.

Also, just like Jacob was told that those after him would be blessed, you need to make sure that you are pouring into those around you when you are a technician. A technician that can strengthen the team of techs on site will be creating a strong environment for them to leave when they jump to becoming an engineer. My current director here at Kenton, Neal Bellamy, put it best to me when he said to me, “Irreplaceable is unpromotable”. This is a large hurdle for a lot of technicians, because they become the lead tech and want to keep advancing but they don’t foster an environment of strong technicians around them and it then becomes too much of a hit for the company to move them out of their position. You must be the better tech and bless those after you. Caring for the past to make a way for the future.

The Action

The last image to pull from this as you advance your career, is that when Jacob wakes up he immediately builds a monument with the rock he was dreaming on. Then he gives the land that he finds himself in a new name.

Once you find your dream, you need to wake up and move. You need to learn more today, read an extra article, explore one more website, study one more spec sheet. Action is all that is left between where you are now and where you want to be. This is the final step, and as you progress in your knowledge and become more of an asset you will be able to move into the engineer role, no matter what company it be with.

An important moment to note in Jacob’s adventure is he renames the land that he is in. It matters more than we usually understand, how we call things. How we refer to ourselves will dictate how we view our path, and that will cause us to take advantages and opportunities that might not have been seen had we not called it differently. If you want to transition from a technician to an engineer, then call yourself an engineer. Tell yourself in your van, “I’m an engineer in a technician role” or “I can see how they engineered this, they could have also done this.”

If you build a dream, interpret the image and then act on it but never see yourself as different or call yourself something more, you’ll be hard pressed to accomplish what you set out to do.

Conclusion

There is no rigid formula to the path of transition from a technician to an engineer. Additionally, the points that were pulled from the story of Jacob’s Ladder in this article are not something that are specific to the transition from a technician to an engineer. You must apply these bigger themes to your life as a whole.

Dream of the parent you want to be, the partner you want to be, the life you want to live, the enjoyments and pleasures that you want in your life. Dissect and interpret what it will take to accomplish that image that you’ve created. Then immediately act on it and speak as though it has already come to fruition and reality is just catching up.

There’s no secret sauce to making the specific transition from a technician to an engineer. In the end you need to know a wide spectrum of things (from mechanical, electrical, logical and more), and you need to be somebody that thinks of those who touch the project down the line. Your life is yours, and yours alone. If you want something, work to get it. Once you apply these major themes, your transition will look completely different from mine but you will move from technician to engineer.

Also know that this is something the industry is in desperate need of. There’s been a large number of engineers in this field that never climbed through a hot attic to pull a wire or dropped a tape roll twenty feet up off a lift. Those many moments compounded make for an engineer who thinks about the project manager and the technician, and that’s exactly what this industry needs.

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