FoodGrads Podcast Episode 70: Exploring a unique career path for an engineering graduate with Tanner Behrend, Manager of Funding and Expansion at Edgecom Energy
Last Updated on July 10, 2023
In this episode we are covering the importance of energy consumption in the food sector, unique career paths for engineering graduates and working as part of a team. But we’ll also go deeper on how to attend tradeshows as a student.
Tanner Behrand, Manager of Funding and Expansion at Edgecom Energy. Edgecom energy provides energy solutions for businesses in Canada. They help provide the data to help businesses understand their consumption and effects on the grid as well provide solutions that are all built into one portal. Tanner is passionate about environmental consciousness, becoming multifaceted in terms of his skill and raising the standard and quality of life worldwide.
Show Notes
Links
Western University Green Process Engineering
Timestamps
[2:08] What Edgecom Energy and Tanner’s role as a manager of funding and expansion
[3:30] Why industries don’t already have access to this information
[5:26] Organization’s that Edgecom Energy have helped and how
[15:06] How Tanner got into this role despite being an engineer by trade
[18:54] Why Tanner decided to become start off as a policy analyst
[23:45] How can food product developers think about the energy perspective in product development
[28:21] Becoming an expert in a field
[31:11] Skills Tanner picked up from transitioning between undergraduate and graduate degree
Tanner Behrend Quotes
We’re getting to a point in time where it really doesn’t matter what your facility is doing, you have to have at least a basic understanding of the energy that’s being consumed and how you’re gonna be managing those spends if you, if you have any hope of remaining competitive as we move into the future.
– Tanner Behrend
The tangible part of that is policy. So I feel like getting a better understanding of how that policy is applied than how different industries are going to be affected by that policy really does help you be on the front lines of actually, creating change in a tangible way.
– Tanner Behrend
I think there’s a lot of different facets that could be considered but the more questions you’re asking on the front end to the rest of the team, to someone who you know, might be a little bit more ingrained within the processes of what’s happening within that facility, what’s happening within that site. I think that’s a really good starting point.
– Tanner Behrend
I think there’s really very few industries where being ableto communicate with different groups of people and be able to tweak the way that you’re talking about things to be appropriate in different kind of levels of conversation is incredibly important. And I think that directly ties into your ability to collaborate and be a successful team member.
– Tanner Behrend
At the end of the day there are some very practical, low effort, low cost ways that you can start developing this or even just put yourself in a situation that would make you uncomfortable. At the end of the day, that’s where you really start developing those new skills and start adding new capabilities or at least uncovering different shortcomings or things that you do wanna start working on.
– Tanner Behrend
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