Kevin Curtis blows a lot of hot air on the job. No, he's not a salesman or stand-up comedian. Kevin, a 41 year old Mechanical Engineering Technologist, designs ventilation systems for new plants and retrofits. He works in the Fredericton office of the engineering firm Neill and Gunter.


Kevin's job is of vital importance. Without proper ventilation, people become uncomfortable or sick, and machines can fail.

The systems he designs can be enormous - one recent project involved ventilation for a factory producing 100,000 pounds of french fries every hour. His involvement starts early on with the conceptual design of the system.

"In the old days," Kevin says, "the engineer would be the one who would do all the design calculations and the conception, and the technician would have the smarts to detail it physically, making sure it fit into the building and so on. That's changed in the last 10 or 15 years. Now, technicians and technologists do as much of those design functions as their abilities allow."

Kevin works in a fluid environment where he might be supervising for awhile, then part of somebody else's team. "Today, there are probably seven or eight technicians I coordinate. Three months from now, on the next project, any one of them might be taking the lead - because it might be in their area of experience."