Connor’s father, second from the right, with his coworkers.
By Dr. Connor Martin, Manager, IT & Cybersecurity at KCF Technologies
I come from people who made things.
My grandfather went down into the coal mines. My mother’s side did two things: they farmed, and they worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, laying and running the track that moved a growing country. My father spent his whole career as a QA engineer on the plant floor at Murata, Cannondale, and Lockheed Martin. Coal, crops, rail, and manufacturing. My family quite literally built this country, and I grew up hearing about all of it.
Then 2008 hit.
The Martins
The Great Recession hit American manufacturing hard, and my father was right in the middle of it. Our family went through some real hardship in those years. I was young, a teenager, but I remember it. I saw what happens when a plant slows down and the work dries up. It doesn’t stay at the factory. It follows you home. It shows up at the dinner table and it lands on the kids. That kind of thing sticks with you.
So when I found KCF, the mission clicked for me right away. Stabilizing American manufacturing, keeping the work here, keeping plants running and people employed. I grew up on the other side of what happens when it goes wrong.
And the day to day of it is something I actually love. I care about machines and motors and fans and pumps. I care about catching the bad bearing before it seizes, the motor before it burns out, the pump before it quits.
A machine going down is a shift lost, a line stopped, a paycheck at risk.
Every piece of equipment we keep running is a job we help protect and a family we help keep steady.
My job at KCF puts me in a unique position to draw on my cybersecurity background: IoT hardware and sensors, secure software development, all of it. Getting to show our customers what the next evolution of American manufacturing looks like is something I take real pride in.