Cummins Confidential : So You Want To Be A Field Service Tech

Short version – it is less “career adventure” and more “mobile fire blanket for every bad decision above your pay grade”.

Meet The “Global Power Technology Leader”

First tell is the byline.

Not “By someone who actually does the job”. Not even “By HR”.

“By Cummins Inc., Global Power Technology Leader”. The same voice that gave you defeat devices, ethical awards and Destination Zero nonsense is now here to tell you what your working life will look like. That should set off every warning light on the dash. And why are they recruiting now? Did the last guy become sick and a conduct threat simultaneously, bychance?

A Day In The Life, But Sanitised

Notice what is missing from their “day in the life” bullet list.

They admit you will:

drive all over creation
bounce from site to site
diagnose and fix complex kit on your own
explain problems to customers who are already angry

What they forget to mention is the usual reality of field service in the real world:

The day starts before “morning dispatch” when you are checking emails at stupid o’clock to see which fires have been dumped on you overnight.
Travel time that magically does not count as work when it suits the rota.
Jobs that are always “urgent” because somebody upstream oversold reliability, cut corners or ignored preventative maintenance.
Bosses who want you to hit response time targets that assume teleportation.

You are the poor sod who has to stand in front of the kit and the customer and make the problem disappear while everyone else hides behind acronyms.

Autonomy, Or Just Being On Your Own

They sell the role as “autonomy” and “independence”. That sounds romantic until you realise it often means the opposite of support.

Autonomy can mean:

You are alone in a muddy yard with a dead generator that runs a care home and a manager breathing down your neck.
You are taking decisions that carry real safety and liability risk while someone in an office watches your job close time on a dashboard.
When things go wrong, the same autonomy is used to dump responsibility on you.

The glossy version is you are a heroic problem solver. The unglossed version is you are an underpaid buffer between Cummins and the consequences of its kit failing.

The Missing Section: Pressure And Risk

Notice how they skip straight from “what you do” to “skills you need” with nothing about what it costs you.

No mention of:

being on call, nights and weekends
working in dangerous environments under time pressure
lifting and hauling heavy components around sites that were not designed for ergonomics
mental load of constant travel and never quite knowing what mess you are about to walk into

If you injure your back, strain your mental health or simply burn out, that will not appear in any nice infographic about “career opportunities”.

Training As Halo, Not Shield

The article loves the phrase “industry leading training”. Wonderful. Does that include:

serious, enforced safety culture when the customer wants the job done yesterday
honest briefings about emissions kit and defeat device history, so you are not lying by omission at the roadside
clear protections when you say “no” because a job is unsafe or unreasonable

Or is the training mostly “how to keep the customer sweet, keep the job open as short as possible, and never, ever admit the product might be at fault”.

Training is only as good as what the company backs with behaviour. Look at how Cummins behaves in court and with its own sick staff and tell me how much you trust the pastoral side of that training.

“Customer Service” Means Eating The Anger

They list customer service as just another bullet point. It is more like half the job.

Who do you think customers shout at when:

the shiny “Global Power Technology Leader” engine has failed at the worst possible moment
the emissions system is throwing codes again
someone sold them “reliability” and what they got was downtime and recall letters

Not the sales rep. Not the board. You.

You are the physical embodiment of Cummins in that moment. You absorb the fury generated by other people’s decisions, then drive to the next one and do it again.

Career Path Or Conveyor Belt

The article ends with all the standard progression options. Specialise, supervise, train others, start your own business. All technically true.

What it does not say is that plenty of field techs simply do not last long enough to find out. They burn out, get injured, or get chewed up by metrics and “performance management”.

If you speak up about workload, safety or corners being cut, watch how quickly the tone changes from “autonomy” to “attitude problem”. We have seen – experienced, even – the Cummins playbook when people complain. It is not pretty.

The Reality Check

Does that mean the job is all bad. No. There is genuine satisfaction in turning up to a dead bit of kit and bringing it back to life. There is pride in being the person who knows how things actually work while office people speak in word salad.

But do not let Cummins sell you a fantasy about variety and independence without clocking the other side of the ledger:

you are the front line for every failure in the chain
you carry the risk, the travel, the stress and the customer rage
you do it under a brand that has already shown what it thinks of workers when something goes wrong

So by all means consider field service. Just understand the difference between the job and the brochure. One is a hard, sometimes rewarding, sometimes brutal way to make a living. The other is a recruitment ad written by a company that cannot even be honest about its own emissions, never mind your working day.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project