Emerson's Larissa Wechsler joins our continuing podcast series on 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert. Our goal with this podcast series is to share the stories of the paths taken to a science, technology, engineering and/or math (STEM) education and career in the field of instrumentation and automation, as well as to learn more about the individuals behind our Emerson experts.

Larissa leads out marketing efforts in the Lifecycle Services that Emerson provides its customers. We hope you enjoy this podcast and feel free to share any ideas on other podcasts you'd like to hear.

Transcript

Jim: Hi everybody, this is Jim Cahill and welcome to another edition of Five Questions for an Emerson Expert. Today I'm joined by Larissa Wechsler. Larissa leads our Lifecycle Services marketing. She has a mechanical engineering degree from her native country, Brazil, and received an MBA from Cornell. Welcome, Larissa.

Larissa: Thank you very much, Jim.

Jim: All right. I like to start by asking our experts, what made you decide to pursue a STEM-based career?

Larissa: Since I was a kid, I always liked math and science and it was always, for me, the easiest subject at school. I initially thought about doing just like pure math as my major, you know, undergrad, but then I realized I want to do something more practical. That's when I just started focusing on like, okay, I wanna do engineering. And what kind of engineering would be like the ones that give me more opportunities? I thought it'll be mechanical engineering. And that's why I chose to do mechanical engineering as my undergrad. And I also thought, like, engineering will open so many doors for different things I wanted to do in my career. It's in the STEM fields or even outside of it, engineering opens so many doors. It also helps you develop that quantitative analytical thought process that helps you anything like professionally and also personally. That's how I started and then later on, as you mentioned, I did my MBA at Cornell because I wanted to have that business background, so I could move more for management roles at Emerson.

Jim: Well, that's great. And I guess from getting that mechanical engineering degree, what led you into the field of process automation?

Larissa: That's a very good question. I started at Emerson two and a half years ago through the MBA leadership program. And the reason I decided to join Emerson in the leadership program it's because this program gives like exposure to senior leadership of the company. So you work with different presidents, you work with different VPs of the company, with different teams in different areas. It gives you the opportunity to be part of strategic programs that are gonna drive growth for the company, but it also gives you the opportunity to explore different areas in the company until you decide what will be the best fit for your career and also would be the best fit as your next role in the company.

Jim: Well, that's great getting broad exposure around the company and everything. So I guess in the role that you're in now around Lifecycle Services, can you tell us about a recent challenge that you've been working on to solve?

Larissa: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, I'm part of...it's a new role. I'm doing marketing for the Lifecycle Services and what we're doing right now is we're creating a value proposition in go to market strategy for automation solutions Lifecycle Services that goes across all business units in our company. And it's a very exciting topic because in the recent studies that we've done, outcome-based services, that's the next generation of services or what we call advanced services, it will take off in the next three to five years with a CAGR of over 8%. It's above the market. We're working on how we're gonna integrate the message, how we're creating a go to market strategy, how we're going to develop a roadmap for that.