“They have lots of experience with a Fortune 500 company. They’ve got talent. They’ve got skills. And the environment in which they work is very team-oriented, which mirrors ours,” said Bob Miller, human resources manager for O’Neil & Associates, a technical writing and product support firm based in Miamisburg.
O’Neil & Associates has hired one NCR employee already and is looking to hire more, Miller said.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has hired a number of former NCR employees, but officials there had no figures available. Wayne Reser, an NCR employee with 23 years of experience in pricing and contract consulting, found out how eager the base was for his skills. He attended a job fair at the University of Dayton in the fall, where a base recruiter offered him a job at comparable pay on the spot.
Lewis Johnson, in charge of hiring acquisition program managers for the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, said his office has hired several former NCR employees under very stringent guidelines set by Congress.
“They have to be able to walk into the job and effectively perform that day,” Johnson said. The NCR applicants he’s interviewed have been strong communicators and “have usually been exposed to a lot of global enterprise.”
A survey in September by Montgomery County Job and Family Services found that a third of NCR’s remaining 425 employees had worked at NCR for more than 10 years and more than half (51 percent) had put in more than 20 years with the company.
Nearly 60 percent were earning salaries between $50,000 and $100,000 a year and another 20 percent were earning above $100,000.
Former NCR employees who have found jobs here say the compensation is comparable if not better than what they earned at NCR, although the bonus and benefits structure is often different.
NCR ties its pay closely to the company’s annual financial performance, so that bonuses and even base pay can vary widely from year to year, said Alex Lashchuk, a software developer who transitioned from NCR to Waibel Energy Systems, a firm of 85 employees in Vandalia.
And while NCR offers a more comprehensive benefits package than smaller companies, NCR employees also fork over a larger share of their paycheck for those benefits, he said.
Lashchuk said he prefers working for a smaller firm like Waibel, where his base pay is more stable and he has more disposable income to decide his own benefits package.
Kevin McGovern, who switched from NCR to a local defense contractor, said he’s had more opportunity to expand his role as a software developer. “With my new position, I’m doing a little bit more with databases and data analyses,” he said.
After 20 years at NCR, Dan Robinson, 46, said he had hit a ceiling there as a technical writer. He’s earning a comparable salary as a temporary full-time employee for ARINC Research Corporation. But perhaps more important, he said, he also has the opportunity to work toward a marketing position.
“There was really no encouragement for me to move laterally or up” at NCR, he said.
David Gasper, who has been helping NCR employees find local jobs, said not everyone from NCR has been able to find a Dayton-area position. NCR employees with 20 or more years of experience, or who held executive positions, “will have a difficult time finding a comparable job at comparable pay” in the Dayton area, he said.
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