ASME INSIDER DREW LENTZ

DREW LENTZ I started my career as a mechanical engineer. And I worked in product design for a little while. After that, I became a teacher for a few years. I taught middle school science. Having to think every single day about articulating something in such a way that it would teach somebody something, and they could learn something from what I was saying, and being forced to be put in the position of making sure that I wasn't just talking, but that I was actually teaching, has really helped me to get to where I am right now.

My name is Drew Lentz, and I'm the director of membership at ASME.

Ultimately, ASME is trying to advance humanity via engineering, empowering engineers to solve the world's problems. From my perspective, membership is at the heart of that. Membership represents the community, the skills, and the purpose behind all those activities through which all of our ASME members can engage to help benefit the world.

The value of being an ASME member comes from the interactions, from the belonging to a community. I can interact with people who have shared experiences with me, who have experienced things that I likely will experience soon in the future, and that can help me to guide and navigate my own way through it.

And that validation can go a long way, especially early in your career where all of these experiences are brand new to you. It's things that are uncertain, that are shaky at the beginning of your career, and all of the sudden you have a group of people that can help you through that and have been there before.

My elevator pitch for ASME, especially ASME membership, would be that there's three key pillars. That is our community: areas where our community can convene and interact with one another. There's our skills where you can learn technical skills that can help you to get a job or to further your job. And lastly, our purpose. Aligning yourself with the mission of ASME: teaching our philanthropic efforts, our sustainability efforts, and pushing forward with volunteering.

Membership is at a really interesting inflection point across the board, not just in ASME, that correlates with the generational shift that's happening in the workforce. Formerly, there was a tradition that, when you entered the workforce, you're a mechanical engineer, you'd become a member of ASME. That has not really translated to Generation Y and Generation Z. So, right now what we're seeing is that the younger generations are more so looking for a personal outreach from known, trusted individuals. So for ASME, in order to truly grow and continue to evolve membership, we need to tap into that personalized outreach. How do we empower our members? How do we give them the tools and make them excited to reach out to their networks and extend their own invitation to bring more members into our community?

Some of our most invested members, the ones that have been with us for so long, the common thread throughout them is that they are so eager to give back. They're so invested in making sure that the next generation of engineers has the skill set, the knowledge that they need to solve the problems that they are going to face. Engineers are amazing problem solvers, and their ability to approach things very objectively and being able to remove bias and truly introduce a scientific approach to solving these problems gives them a unique ability to attack a problem with fierce, fierce focus, which I think is unique across a lot of other professionals.