 Roger Carolin
President and CEO
CFM Technologies
West Chester, PA
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 B.S. -
Electrical Engineering, Duke University
M.S. - Business
Administration, Harvard Business School |
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President and CEO of
CFM Technologies. He works in corporate administration
overseeing the companies' activities. |
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"Networking, get to
know people, get to understand how people communicate and work
together effectively." |
 
"In 1983, I was in graduate school at Harvard Business School working on
my MBA and I had a classmate by the name of Christopher McConnell and he
and I decided that we would like to do an independent study. And really,
our purpose in doing an independent study was to look for a business
opportunity. We were both interested in starting a company."
As president of CFM Technologies, Roger A. Carolin hires engineers
regularly. The principal quality he looks for in a candidate is drive. He
is interested in hiring "someone who really has a desire to do things and
really wants to have impact and make a difference, (who wants) to take the
initiative. That, above all, is the single most important quality for an
engineer's success"
Carolin's company rewards engineers who actively pursue their personal
interests. At CFM Technologies, management believes that it benefits the
company as well as the individual. Carolin describes a recently-promoted
engineer as having "by nature a somewhat entrepreneurial personality. He
wants to have some freedom to make things happen on an individual basis,
and I think that going into marketing and sales was a good fit with those
desires. So here we always try to find a way to accommodate the
individual's personal goals and desires. And it's through selfish interest
because, when someone's doing something that they want to do and they like
to do, they tend to be naturally more motivated in doing it and generally
get a better result too."
Beyond drive, Carolin looks for different qualities in a candidate,
depending on the position for which he or she is applying. He considers
GPA "a good indicator of intelligence and the willingness to apply the
energy needed to get the grade," but not the strongest indicator of
success. Certain positions are ideal for introverted, technical persons.
The company has "some roles where brilliance is really important and that
person doesn't need to interact a great deal with the rest of his
colleagues or the outside world, but he needs to have great ideas for what
we can do in the future."
Conversely, there are also roles that require the ability to interact well
with others. "If it's a person who's going to work … doing a major
product, interfacing with manufacturing, interfacing with the customer,
then, of course, communication skills are very, very important." And
Carolin believes that, in general, "engineers tend not to place enough
emphasis on communications skills."
He advises undergraduates and graduate students to work on "networking,
getting to know people, getting to understand how people communicate and
work together effectively." He adds, "One of the things that most
universities do is that they reward you for working individually." In
fact, Carolin points out, in the real world engineers need "to work as
part of a team."
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