Page 319 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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THINK BIG GROWING OUR OWN
The spring of 2008 wasn’t exactly the best time to be looking for a job. Banks were on edge. Housing starts were on the slide. Businesses were laying off. But then Ryan Shearer was just a high school se- nior looking at career possibilities. “I was pretty sure I wanted to go to WyoTech, but then I attended a job fair at Portland Community College. That’s where I found out about Caterpillar’s ThinkBIG program. Caterpillar was the biggest name in diesel that I knew of, and being a Cat technician would be a real feather in my hat no matter where my career path took me. Plus, they had a program an hour and a half from my hometown and a dealer less than a half hour away. All that helped me decide.”
Shearer entered the ThinkBIG program in the fall of 2008 as a Halton apprentice. His potential was apparent from the start. “At my branch store, The Dalles, we had six or seven technicians at the time, and at least five of them had over twenty years of experience with Caterpillar equipment,” says Shearer. “So from the beginning, I had a great group of people to draw from, and that was a huge advantage for me. Since our store was so small, you worked on everything. Nobody specialized. I rebuilt cylinders, transmissions, and drive-train components. I worked on engines for older machines with pony motors and newer machines with ECMs. We did a bit of everything.”
Toward the end of the two-year program, Shearer was assigned a field truck.1 “One of our older technicians had surgery and he couldn’t drive a truck or do anything. So sometimes I’d end up driving Miss Daisy around. I would drive him to jobs, and he would point out what things to do and how to do it.” Shearer stayed in the field for another five or six years, then moved inside as the service manager/scheduler/dispatcher. Then he transferred over to Power as a commercial engine technician.
1 By then, Shearer was a Peterson employee since Peterson had acquired Halton in 2010.
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