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John Kane is the president of Wyvern Industrial Technology, as well as the vice president of the Executive Committee of the Coordinate Metrology Society.

Michelle: How did you end up getting into metrology?

John: If you go to an event like CMSC every year, you hear kind of a similar story from a lot of people, which is, I don't think a lot of people intentionally get into a career in metrology and that's certainly true with me.

I actually, as was kind of common at the time, started my career, way back when, as an apprentice engineer when I left school. And I was particularly interested in IT stuff. I ended up becoming particularly interested in things like networking in the computer sense, as opposed to the talking to people sense.

And I ended up doing IT infrastructure and repair as an engineer for a couple of different IT companies. And I wanted to, being kind of young and wanting to see the world, have a job that involved more travel. And it just so happened, I came across a very mysterious advert saying somebody was looking for a support engineer with a lot of international travel required, and I was like, Oh, that sounds good. And there was no information on this, in terms of what was required. So, I sent an email and it just so happened that it was the founder of a company called Third Dimension.

A guy called Tim, and he was working with one other guy. He was doing software. The other guy was doing hardware. And they developed a metrology system. They didn't want to do any of the going and dealing with customer part of it, so they were looking for somebody that could do that.

This was back in, sort of, the early-to-mid-2000s, so embedded computing was kind of a new thing. We were sort of figuring this stuff out as we went. And there was an element of how communications and networking needed working out as well in the process of this.

So, I ended up joining them and I was doing that kind of stuff. We built the company up and enjoyed the journey we went on. And ultimately, that led to me starting my own company over here in the US. It was a journey that came about through following things I was passionate about.