Company Wide Engineering/Design Openings: Clearing house or Restructuring?

[ControlsEE]

So on my routine (every few months) check of engineering positions available across the park industry, I came across eight open positions in SEAS for various engineering roles. To me this is unprecedented, as usually there are 0-1 positions available as engineering departments at parks are usually pretty small. To have eight available is very rare! Wait until you see which ones they are...

VP Entertainment - Corporate
Project Manager - BGT/AIT
Director of D&E - BGW
Director of D&E - SWSD
Director of D&E - SWO
Project Manager - SWO
Coordinator/Project Engineer - SPP
Director of D&E - SWSA

I noticed that Jonathan Smith was listed as the Corporate VP of Engineering, which he was an engineer at BGW for a while, so is all of this restructuring, clearing house, or something else? I don't have any inside contacts with the engineering departments at any park, so for all I know, this is just a bunch of retirements and after the existing engineers got shifted around, these are the openings available. They were all posted about 3-4 weeks ago.

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[Ice]

It is a strong, strong indicator of some form of restructuring. Typically when an array of "Director" rolls post openings across a company, it is simply inserting a position in-between two positions. Can be a sign of a company wanting to grow and expand their capabilities top down, though I don't know how a company like SEAS can expand their design/engineering force unless they have been completely squeezed dry with the close to annual projects chain-wide.

There is very much a ceiling on their engineering department's output separate from just being resource driven, this isn't exactly a "we can take on more projects if we expand our resources", they are limited by their parks needing at most a project a year. Unless you start lumping in infrastructure needs, in which case I see it as impending doom, so hire like crazy if you got the $.

 

[ControlsEE]

Yes, currently we have a "Director of Project Management" position open at my company. Basically, it is someone who oversees the project managers (who oversee the engineers), but is below the VP of Engineering. If I remember correctly, the Director role at BGW was held by Larry Giles, under Suzie Cheely, the VP of Engineering at BGW. Makes me wonder if Larry is still there.

 

[Jonesta6]

I thought Larry got moved to corporate, which on itself allowed the park to finally start working with Intamin for new attractions again?

 

[ControlsEE]

Larry moving to corporate very well may be true, I really don't know. As far as the Intamin dry-spell, it's unknown who or what caused that. My guess was that if Larry moved to corporate AND was the reason for the dry spell, I would wager that we wouldn't be seeing any Intamins at any SEAS park if Larry had the influence that comes from being corporate. This logic would lead me to believe that either Larry isn't at corporate OR wasn't the cause of the Intamin shortage.

 

[Jonesta6]

Maybe? Depending on the authority he was given - don't the park D&E teams get some leeway in attraction vendor selection?

 

[ControlsEE]

Maybe? Depending on the authority he was given - don't the park D&E teams get some leeway in attraction vendor selection?

Really depends. From my own personal experience, corporate engineering teams often overrule location engineers... and it often bites them in the rear. A coaster is a large investment that the corporate team would have to sign off on before any contracts are signed. My guess would be that, like many companies I work with (much larger than SEAS btw), a corporate engineer is assigned to each capital project and that corporate engineer has the final say, after consulting with the location engineers, on who and what was brought in. Local engineers are usually there to preform high level maintenance tasks and to bring capital project ideas to the corporate teams. Local teams know more what their specific location needs and corporate engineers are the ones deciding if those solving those needs will benefit the larger company. The fact that they are looking for a lot of people to fill local positions tells me that either they moved a bunch of folks up to corporate or they had retirements/layoffs at the local level and need to fill all of those positions. Its still weird that all of these positions are available all at once, unless, like @Ice said, these are newly created positions.

 

[Nicole]

@BGWnut and others have posted on this Forum in the past about both the rift between Larry Giles and Intamin and Larry's move to SEAS corporate.

 

[Gavin]

Director of D&E isn't a new position, Suzy Cheely currently holds it at BGW. I don't remember where I heard it, but I was under the impression that she was getting ready to retire.

Edit: Looking into a few other things, it seems VP of D&E and Director of D&E is used interchangeably by SEAS with no rhyme or reason.