Application Engineer Dwight Oakey Receives Employee-Owner of the Quarter Award

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Please join us in congratulating Dwight Oakey on receiving the Employee-Owner of the Quarter (EOQ) award! The EOQ award recognizes and shows appreciation to an employee-owner who demonstrated exceptional performance over the previous quarter. For all his work on our software platforms, immersive technology projects, and other major initiatives, we are proud to present Dwight with the Q4 2021 award.

“Dwight has a plethora of knowledge when it comes to teaching the LMS to team members,” said a colleague who nominated him for the award. “With his patience, great communication skills, and detailed explanations, he trains other employees to quickly grasp concepts and the functionality of the learning management system.”

Dwight has also been involved with many other important company initiatives. He has played a major role in ONEIL’s mixed reality and augmented reality efforts as well as the GRILL Summer Challenge mentoring high school students. This year, Dwight will also work on an ONEIL-developed mobile app that will scan and read a model or serial number from a product nameplate and link a user to the associated content for the scanned number on the ONeSOURCE web application.

We asked Dwight to share his thoughts about his ONEIL career.

Briefly share your career trajectory and what originally brought you to ONEIL.
I’ve been in and around computers since I was 11 years old. Even when I wasn’t working in a computer job, I was still the guy who helped use and usher in computer technology. In 2003 and 2004, I spent some time as a computer consultant entrepreneur. This wasn’t paying enough to feed my family, so I started filling out applications. I filled out applications across the nation. That’s when ONEIL – 20 miles from home – gave me a call. I started at ONEIL in 2005 and am still here almost 17 years later, and it has been great!

What do you enjoy most about your work at ONEIL?
I most enjoy learning and getting to work with technologies new to me. For example, I have the extreme pleasure to be working with Augmented Reality right now. Augmented Reality (AR) is working with programs to display computer-generated overlays onto a smartphone’s camera view, or head-mounted devices like Microsoft’s Hololens or Google Glass. Making our technical manuals come to life by displaying computerized images onto the machinery you’re working with really delivers the right information to the right hands at the right time.

What motivates you to go beyond in your role?
I’ve always been involved in customer support, even when I’m not actually in customer support. ONEIL epitomizes customer service, and that is a natural fit for me. You always have a customer; you just have to realize who your customer is. Sometimes it is the paying customer, sometimes it is an “internal” customer, and sometimes it is a colleague working on the same project with you. I want to be the best me I can be. So, whether it is working with the brand-new, emerging AR technology, or working on a legacy code base, I want it to be the best and look the best, and represent ONEIL to the best of its abilities. If I can help it do that, then that’s what I want to do.

Dwight’s leadership skills, project initiative, and passion for his work make us proud to have him on our team, and we look forward to even more of his outstanding contributions in the future!