#36 – The Career Road Less Travelled with Attila Pentek
In 2005, Wallbridge Mining a junior exploration company based in Sudbury Canada, hired two students to help out with their summer exploration programs. One of these students was Ahmad, the host of this podcast, who only ended up working with Wallbridge for that summer before building a career through different roles and opportunities in several multi-national companies. The other was Attila Pentek, who ended up staying with the company for the next 15 years, starting as a student, then working as an exploration geologist, then a resource geologist, a mine manager, a business development geologist and now heads up their exploration department.
Our industry has plenty of examples of people that jump between jobs every 3-5 years. It is rare to find someone like Attila that has stayed with a company for such a long time. Even rarer still, is someone that has done it at the start of their career with a junior explorer. Junior companies are not usually renowned for having established programs that develop and nuture graduates. Maybe the reason that Attila stayed with Wallbridge for so long has something to do with the culture that the company has created, where loyalty is rewarded by opportunity.
At some point, all of us have faced these questions: when is it time to leave? Is it better to switch jobs to chase opportunities? Or stay and show loyalty where the reward is opportunities provided?
Our guest today is Attila Pentek and we talk to him about the career road less travelled.
