application developer

instrument technician

repair technician

controls engineer

mechanical technician

Novaspect

Recently, Talent Management asked that employees write a positive review here. This tells me that they’re reading these. Instead, I’ll write an honest review from my own perspective.
 
Novaspect is great place to start your career in engineering but surprisingly, the culture is learn as you go with no real life line to a manager or to the manager’s support. This is most likely because the managers have no real experience, having been promoted into the position based on bias or default, or having been with the company for their lifetime. A company should always hire/promote the most qualified candidate for the position, not provide it out of guilt, friendship or simply to fill the seat. In the long run the employee suffers, the manager suffers, the manager’s manager suffers and so does the company.
 
Thankfully, there are some amazing coworkers willing to jump in on the drop of a dime. Those individuals are truly committed to their job, documenting the process of success, creating procedures for task completion consistency, the customer’s satisfaction and company sustainability.
 
Of course there are some employees who do the bare minimum, continuously taking advantage of the committed coworkers, falling on their sword of ignorance due to lack of written policies or procedures or just point blank ignoring the ask. This could be related to the continuous change of role responsibilities, across all departments, making it hard to know what people do or should be held accountable for. My guess is it’s a contributing factor but most likely it’s because there are no real performance improvement plans. These individuals either continue their course or BOOM - get fired. This again is due to guilt, friendships or inexperienced management.
 
While middle management will certainly leave you shaking your head, most of the executive management team seems to have their act together, recognizing things can be better. I do believe these executives want to improve things and are doing what they think is best. However, what needs to be realized is not every member of the team is willing to address the issues and strikes fear of retaliation into his direct/indirect reports.
 
Although Novaspect offers training opportunities, they are purchased training courses for things like Leadership Development (if you’re a favorite), Crucial Conversation or Acclivus R3 Sales training. These are Novaspect centric trainings, none of which are really useful in the world outside of Novaspect and certainly not job specific. Novaspect lacks written training materials or training courses/classes in areas to do your job such as Salesforce, IFS, Emerson’s Guardian Portal, SharePoint, etc. The most basic necessity to be successful, training.
 
I will say, Novaspect did and continues to handle the Coronavirus Pandemic amazingly. The genuine concern for each and every employee will never be discredited. There can never be a doubt that Novaspect will do what is right when they know the facts of the situation.
 
So certainly Novaspect is a company with potential but... the correct executive management team really needs to talk to front line employees if they want the (new buzz word) HONEST facts and to address the issues. Perhaps a good start would be to take in the feedback of these reviews and address corrective action, rather than encouraging of flooding this page with positive reviews. There’s an old saying... you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

A good stepping stone position. This job offers you an opportunity to get into systems administration and get working knowledge of production facilities and their required networking and server needs. 

Beyond that, you will have a difficult time making this company a long term position. There are few positions available for advancement beyond a field engineer, but there are many opportunities and even encouragement from management to move laterally. 

The company really seems to care about their employees, to an extent. Encouraging you to take it easy and quit early on Friday's when possible because they know you will more than make it up during the busy season with the significant amount of overtime REQUIRED of field engineers. The way jobs are quoted and the amount of staff available for a significant coverage area means you will be forced to work overtime to get the job done. (This is the opposite of what you are told when you are interviewed.) Novaspect also offers training opportunities, they have a student loan reimbursement program, decent 401k match with full vestment and company shares after just 2 years (that is at the companies discretion of if and when they pay out). ‘Unlimited’ personal time, 3 weeks of vacation and roughly 9 paid holidays a year. Company phone and laptop for each employee as well as a company car option for field service employees. 

The bad of this company is the low starting pay, the significant travel time ( typically 3 hours travel per day if you are at site ), the excessive overtime doesn’t leave much of a work/life balance, poorly managed teams, lack of support except by other employees in your own local office, autonomy for all employees often leads to poor communication between project coordinators. 

All that being said there are some seriously smart and dedicated people working for Novaspect who make the day-to-day work possible. I’ve learned a significant amount, and do not regret the experience I’ve gained.

Novaspect is always trying to maintain their position of being a company that delivers high value day in and day out to their customers by applying technical solutions through great product and services.  One factor they recognize is that it is the people that make up Novaspect that are key to this success, not just the great products they offer.  I have been with them for over five years and don't see myself ever leaving because of the value placed on making sure employees are able to be successful.

It seems like most of the management have been through the ranks and have a close understanding of the customers and solutions provided.  This has been encouraging as it shows that there are advancement paths available.  There are really some awesome "mentors" to learn from, and the opportunity for top notch product and industry training is second-to-none.  Hang-on though, as the pace at times can be pretty fast, but the support is there to make sure everyone is doing well.  There are lots of folks who have been at the company for 25+ years and seem to enjoy coming to work as much as the new grads that get hired. 

It is very rewarding to be looked upon by the customers as one of the best automation solution providers in the industry.  To sound corny, there are no B-team players at Novaspect.  Everyone there has a real passion for turning customer pain into customer satisfaction, and there are enough sharp folks that will pitch in to help that there are rarely any times when you feel that we can't fix that issue.  I haven't found one person who wouldn't help me out of a bind after hours or on weekends, and this just makes you feel like there is always someone who has your back.

It seem like the territory we cover has a nice diverse base of customers and that helps keep the workload consistent.  It is nice also because one project you may work in is in the pulp and paper industry, and the next in a refinery, so there is alway an interesting challenge.

Overall a company of great colleagues, and I thoroughly enjoyed being on the team. If you are in the upper Midwest, you will be happy to be a part of the company. 
Not perfect by any means with many areas of improvement. Including that changes often happen, sometimes with excellent planning and incomplete implementation. Sometimes with minimal planning and good implementation. Overall base-level employees and middle managers have many ideas, and some are implemented. However, most change is forced from the top down. These changes often are focused on internal metrics and financial tracking and not on helping customer relationships. A weak area would be sales accountability. It seems that account managers are left unchecked. This is good if they are good but is terrible if they are poor, and there are some good and poor ones. At the top, sales management needs to push a focused approach and follow-up to ensure customers are being helped. Another area of improvement is top management is stale and is in need of new ideas. 
Additionally, managers should be given time to be involved and support sales pursuits for their groups and to build relationships with our customers, especially our most important ones. I was able to have all great managers, and they were smart, able to provide sound advice, and good at pushing people to do more and bring up new ideas. Working there allowed me to stretch and grow.  
Many positive changes in my time there including new training programs, allowing engineers to work autonomously, having a defined career progression, better benefits, easy access to the manager, new engineering tools, good bonus goals and moving to be digital.
To summarize, the company needs some new blood at the top, but this is more than offset by a good culture, good managers, and awesome colleagues that will support you even if you don't see them much. 

There are no "cushy" jobs at Novaspect. The goals and expectations are set very high for everyone, and you are expected to perform at that high level. Management strives to implement a culture of passion, teamwork, and candor. They expect you to carry a certain level of autonomy in your job, and the focus is an excellent customer experience every time.  They also expect you to speak up if you see room for improvement in any area, or if you feel management has overlooked some key details while implementing new strategies.

That being said, meeting the expectations of the company can be grueling at times. You may become mentally and (in some cases) physically exhausted in the work. The good news is that the benefits (including vacation, pay, and insurance) are wonderful, so that can be a motivating factor to work hard. Other motivating factors are the people that you work with become your team, and the flexibility that the company offers for a healthy work-life balance allows for some breathers.

Bottom line is that you shouldn't consider Novaspect if you are not prepared to give your all and to be challenged by the organization. Although Novaspect is a relatively small company, they set the bar as high as any Fortune 500 company does.

Novaspect (commonly referred to as “No Respect” by employees and customers) is an extension of Emerson, representing itself as a local business partner to a specified territory. As such, they have a secure presence in a defined territory with no competition. That is their stronghold. There is no commitment to the customer, community or the employees. They recently became an employee owned company only in order to buyout the mandatory retiring president. The new president provides zero direction, inspiration or future growth plans. The executive team is only focused on today and the money being made now, in order to pay off shareholders. There is no long term employee retention plan, secure the future of Novaspect plan or revitalization plan for disillusioned customers. Emerson must be proud.
So many experienced employees have resigned that positions are being filled unskilled, inexperienced warm bodies. IT SHOWS! Management takes no responsibility for employee departure, declining morale or disengagement. Work place culture is more about socializing and less about being productive. The job itself is not hard, there are just not enough people to help get it done. The most enjoyable part of the job is... the end of the day.

I don't typically like to write reviews unless I've had a very bad or very good experience with something that I believe is worth sharing and, in this case, the experience is being extremely positive. These are only a couple of the points that I consider worth mentioning:

* As a sales engineer with passion for technology and customers, Novaspect gives me both, great state of the art technology and a company that couldn't care more about customer satisfaction.

* Novaspect does really care for its employees offering a lot of great benefits, flexibility and willing to help them with any personal or work related problems or concerns that they might have. As a perfect example of this is how the company has handled the Coronavirus situation  providing us with a great amount of resources in order to make us feel calm and to help us to be able to perform as efficiently as possible in our jobs while making our families' health and happiness a priority.

I could go on and on but hopefully this gives a good idea of how I feel about Novaspect!

The shop is split into two side ggc valves and safety reliefs the guys I work with are great (on the ggc side) the safety relieve side has a current employee who is the worst human being I’ve ever met and in my 35+ years I’ve worked in quit a few places. He thrives on being the biggest sarcastic egotistical jackwagon on the planet. No one in the shop wants to work with him, he brings the entire shop down and he loves it. I personally feel bad for the employees that have to put up with him. He gets away with anything and everything because he’s so far up the bosses butt. (They’re good buddies)  management is week he’s more of a friend than a boss he allows employees pick and choose the jobs they want to go on which screws the other guys that don’t cry and moan about it, there’s absolutely no communication, planning jobs is awful. The pay is decent but nothing special you can make just as much without having to freeze your butt off in the winter or burn to death on boilers.

( this review is about on place that novaspect owns)The Guys out in the shop are great to work with some people in the office are great workers also. Management is sad don't have an idea whats going on in the shop or how to run the service side of things. most management are very close friends so there is a lot of the buddy system that happens.  hurting for work and losing customers due to high prices to do service work  lack of experience in the shop and with others leaving it will be hard for it to stay running.  the job says a machinist but everything they are wanting is a cnc machinist well guess what there is not one cnc machine so if that tells ya how much they know about the shop. ETC...

it used to be a great place to work until new management came in

Novaspect is suffering the fate of a company that grew too fast and was unable to sustain said growth.  However staffing continued to grow in anticipation of growth that never occurred.   Sales then dwindled.   Soon the cost savings measures started.   Top executives began bailing out, restructuring took place then progressed to voluntary retirement, which lead to raise suspension, which lead to aggressive headcount reduction, that left many faithful employees without a job and families to support.  

Novaspect was a good place to work.  Work life balance was encouraged, the front lines had a small company feel to it, but the executive end of the company was cold, calculating, and uncaring.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Application developer 2 salaries reported	$102,500 per year
Instrument technician 11 salaries reported	$38.91 per hour
Repair technician 3 salaries reported	$29.00 per hour
Controls engineer 8 salaries reported	$107,500 per year
Mechanical technician 6 salaries reported	$28.83 per hour

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