By Sarah Nicastro, Creator and Editor in Chief, Future of Field Service
One of the themes that has come up repeatedly in conversations throughout my career is how many people serendipitously end up in field service. That includes myself – I wrote about my foray into field service here.
The elusiveness of how to describe the vast potential within the breadth of industries that make up ‘field service’ is a massive challenge. This challenge at least in part explains how rarely these careers are modeled to young talent and how often individuals “land” in field service without ever even knowing it existed.
On last week’s episode of Frontline UNSCRIPTED, Marina George, a Field Service Engineer at Oxford Instruments, she shared her own story that perfectly illustrates the narrow view of career paths we offer to students and young adults. As a child, Marina wanted to be a doctor. She loved science, and in her mind, as it is for so many young people interested in science, healthcare represented the obvious path.
"There really only seemed to be one career trajectory available with my love of science, which is being a doctor," she reflected. This summarizes well the way we generalize entire fields that represent hundreds of career paths into one of a handful of options kids know to consider or select for their future.
Years later, after pursuing undergraduate research, earning a PhD, completing a postdoctoral fellowship, and managing advanced microscopy technologies, Marina discovered field service.
A technology provider she had built a relationship with while setting up a laboratory suggested she consider a role within their business. Until that moment, Marina hadn't realized that a career existed that would allow her to combine her passion for science, technology, problem-solving, and helping people.
That conversation changed everything.
Today, she spends her days supporting researchers and scientists using some of the most advanced imaging technology available—while building relationships with customers and helping shape future product innovation.
Her story emphasizes an important question: How do we change the reality that much of the talent we seek aren’t aware that careers in field service exist?
The Visibility Problem: Painting a Narrow View of Career Opportunities
When we ask children what they want to be when they grow up, the answers tend to be remarkably consistent: doctor, teacher, firefighter, police officer, athlete, veterinarian.
There's nothing wrong with any of those careers. But they represent only a tiny fraction of the opportunities available. The challenge is how we help young people also see the diverse careers that sit adjacent to those familiar professions.
As Marina pointed out, every iconic profession has an entire ecosystem of supporting roles behind it. "I feel like all the careers that we see are these different icons, and kids don't realize that they have a whole team supporting them as well," she said. "Doctors, nurses; lawyers, paralegals—there are all of these extra careers that are part of that one piece."
Field service is an example of this that reaches across countless industries.
A student interested in science may never learn that they could spend their career installing, maintaining, troubleshooting, and optimizing cutting-edge scientific equipment. Someone fascinated by technology may never discover a role that combines technical expertise with customer engagement, travel, problem-solving, and innovation.
Yet these are precisely the types of careers many organizations are struggling immensely to fill.
I don’t have the answers on how, but I do believe that to adequately address talent shortages and create workforce sustainability, we need to expand awareness. We need to help young people understand not only the professions they recognize, but the countless opportunities that exist around them.
The Frontline Role: Technical Skills are Just the Start
What’s so interesting about Marina's story isn’t just how she found field service, but also what she discovered once she got there.
Like many people entering technical roles, she expected technology to be the primary focus. What she didn't anticipate was how much of her success would depend on relationships. "The biggest part that I love about my role is building that relationship with the customer," she said.
Working with highly sophisticated microscopy systems, Marina often finds herself spending hours alongside researchers in laboratories, helping them solve problems, navigate challenges, and maximize the value of their equipment.
Those interactions create something far more valuable than transactional support; they create trust. And trust creates insight.
Because field service engineers are often present during critical moments, they hear things customers don't always share through formal channels. "They really tell you what they want," Marina explained. "There's something special about that in-person, face-to-face human connection."
It's a reminder that while organizations continue investing in customer experience programs, surveys, and analytics, some of the richest customer intelligence still comes from the people closest to the customer.
The frontline doesn't just solve problems, they intimately understand them in a way that can help refine, improve, and expand your business if you harness that knowledge.
The Simplest Advice That Unlocks The Human Side of Field Service
While Marina has come to really enjoy and value customer relationships, she first had to overcome a challenge many frontline professionals face: developing confidence in customer interactions.
She admitted that when she first entered the role, the technical side felt comfortable. The human side felt less certain. She worried about how to communicate with customers. How to handle difficult conversations. How to interact with senior leaders and highly accomplished researchers.
The advice she received from leadership was surprisingly simple. "Just be yourself," she said was the encouragement she received.
At first glance, maybe that advice could seem almost too simplistic. But the more I interact with professionals across all levels of organizations and within various industries, the more I believe that authenticity is one of the most powerful relational skills anyone can develop.
Customers don't expect perfection. They expect honesty. They expect empathy. They expect someone who listens. We are best equipped to exhibit those characteristics when we aren’t expending energy trying to perform our role in the way we believe we’re supposed to, but are empowered to fulfill our role as our genuine selves.
Marina described how transformative it was to stop viewing interactions as performances and instead approach them as conversations between people. "Remembering that they're just people as well" became a mindset that helped her build confidence, whether she was working with researchers, executives, or laboratory leaders.
We know that today’s demands of the frontline extend far beyond technical skills; in fact, most leaders I speak with agree that the most impactful frontline capabilities are fundamentally human. Marina’s story about the advice she received and how it gave her the confidence she needed to build such deep customer relationships should prompt leaders to consider the value of trusting the talent you’ve chosen to do the job you’ve chosen them to do in a way that fits who they are.
What’s the Future of Career Growth in Field Service?
Another topic Marina and I explored was one that continues to surface across the industry: career progression. Historically, field service careers followed a fairly predictable path. Engineer becomes supervisor, supervisor becomes manager, manager becomes director, and so on.
But today's workforce increasingly wants progression and growth, which makes that traditional path an issue. Some talent wants a path to growth but don’t necessarily want to move into leadership, and organizations can’t simply promote everyone to a sea of leaders.
Marina believes organizations are missing opportunities if they fail to create broader career pathways for frontline talent. After all, field service professionals develop unique expertise that combines rich technical knowledge with an immersion in real-world operating environments and deep customer intimacy.
"Field service engineers are with the product every day," Marina said. "They're seeing things maybe the factory hasn't even seen."
That knowledge can create tremendous value across organizations—in product development, quality, applications, customer success, training, innovation, and beyond.
The challenge isn't finding career paths, but rather intentionally creating them—and adapting the organization to a model where frontline talent is farmed to various parts of the business rather than expected to stay in that role for 10, 15, 20 years (which simply isn’t realistic today).
The Opportunity Ahead
What I appreciated most about Marina's perspective is how her personal understanding of what field service is and what it represents to the business mirrors what we discuss often from a business standpoint:
Field service isn't simply about fixing equipment. It's about enabling outcomes. It's about building trust. It's about helping customers achieve what they're trying to accomplish.
Through this lens, the opportunity that exists for service businesses is exciting, but so too is the incredible potential for fulfilling careers. The challenge is articulating that potential and finding new ways to help talent see all that field service offers.
Because somewhere right now is a student just like Marina once was who also loves science, technology, problem-solving, and helping people but who has never heard of field service.
Yes, that is one of our biggest challenges, but it’s also one of our greatest opportunities.