Paul's story

As a highly trained engineer and former customer of ABB, Paul Garner never saw himself in an ABB Sales role, but finds that it’s an ideal fit for his skills.

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Paul Garner 

Account Manager
Milton Keynes, UK

​​​​​​“Follow your passion. It gives you a lot of energy and is the momentum that drives your career.” 

Before starting his career with ABB, Paul Garner, Account Manager for Education and Collaborative Robots, Milton Keynes, England, started as an engineering apprentice with a large UK aerospace company. He had studied mechatronics during his four years at college, which included courses in PLC programming and robotics. After completing his apprenticeship, Paul was offered a full time position in the engineering team. While there, Paul progressed his career with roles of increasing responsibility through various departments, but his primary role was to design, install and commission automated robotic systems for wide range of applications.

“During that time, I got to know the ABB products very well because I was a customer,” said Paul.
“That meant that I also received a lot of the training that was offered by ABB at the same Training Centre that I now walk through almost every day.”

One day Paul noticed that ABB had advertised a job opportunity for an applications engineer, which he saw as an attractive way of moving from the customer side of the equation to working directly for ABB. According to Paul, “I saw it as a golden opportunity to further develop my engineering skills, so I went for it.”

Paul has now been with ABB for six years and during that time has continued to progress in three different roles within ABB. Starting as an applications engineer within ABB, Paul wore many different hats while the team he was leading worked on delivering global projects. 

“It gave me great satisfaction to successfully complete a wide range of projects, and I found that I gravitated toward project management,” said Garner. “It wasn’t long before ABB said, ‘You’re good at this. Would you like to take on that role and further develop our Logistics Incubator project management team?’ And that’s what I did for the next three years, leading the team to deliver customer systems, including several very large projects for a major online retailer, and we had a great time doing it.”

After a few years of frequent travel around Europe, which Paul said was exciting and fulfilling, he decided the time was right for another role change. 

“One of the great things about ABB is that they really do listen,” Garner said. “The company was genuinely interested in what I wanted to do, what kinds of things I was interested in and how my role could be developed to satisfy my career goals. They took great care to look at my strengths and identify areas within ABB where those skills would be best suited.”

Somewhat to his surprise, that’s when Paul was offered an opportunity to make a change from Project Management to Sales. Being a technical type by training, he had never really considered Sales, but ABB had determined that his detailed technical knowledge and experience across the range of ABB products – originally as a customer and later as an ABB product provider - would be invaluable to current and prospective customers. And they were right.

Paul said, “My background often enabled me to clarify what customers really needed as opposed to what they thought they needed. The ability to clearly ascertain, describe and arrive at the right technical solution in collaboration with a customer because I genuinely understand their needs is valuable to them and to ABB. That understanding and honesty builds a lot of trust, which is crucial when you’re making the kind of investments our customers are making.”

Because ABB supports talent and provides opportunities to grow and develop skills, sometimes in areas not originally considered, career progression is an exciting adventure at ABB. 

“I came to ABB in part because I had worked with ABB robots for 15 years and knew how good they are,” Paul said. “One of the things I enjoy so much about my job is that I am proud to sell ABB solutions because I am confident that they are high quality products that are absolutely right for the job. 

“It’s very rewarding to see that you’ve made a demonstrable difference not only to your customers, but to your employer... and your career.” 

This is Paul's story.
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