Joel Leonard, the Maintenance Evangelist

Joel Leonard is a passionate, global advocate for the cause of taking maintenance and the role of maintenance workers seriously for business profitability. His career, that has spanned teaching, consulting, senior management and public speaking renders Joel the ideal resource to help trumpet the resolution to the Maintenance Crisis. Joel's new book Enterprise Asset Management: Avoiding a Maintenance Crisis, will be released n 2009.

The average age of hundreds of thousands of maintenance people across the globe is 48. Many of the boomer generation have started to retire, leaving empty maintenance positions unfilled. Companies are facing a challenge in finding qualified workers to fill these vacancies. With no one to fix broken pipes, frayed wires, aging equipment, and few who understand how to support modern automation technologies, nations are finding themselves in what Joel Leonard has coined, "The Maintenance Crisis."

A former vice-president of the Association for Facilities Engineering, Joel is taking the lead internationally in identifying, explaining and helping to solve the problem. His creative strategies to build awareness have included holding job fairs specific to the maintenance industry, writing articles, public speaking at from major conventions to high school classes, writing songs, developing an on-line TV network and now writing books. As a result of his efforts, Joel was appointed to the United States Council on Competitiveness, a national think-tank whose purpose is to work with legislators and the White House to inform policy decisions that lead to effective strategies for economic development. Internationally, corporate and governmental leaders are seeking Joel's advice and he has been interviewed on National Public Radio and CNBC.

Working with Chicago-based Putman Media, Inc., a publisher of nine trade magazines, Joel has been a contributing columnist for Plant Services Magazine for the past five years. The 140,000 readers have followed Joel's work onto the Internet, where, in 2007, Joel founded SkillTV.net, the first on-line television network dedicated to helping build awareness of and offering solutions to the "Maintenance Crisis." Programming includes interviews with congressional leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, educators, engineers and maintenance technicians in the US, Canada and abroad.

Born in Fremont, California Joel is a 1987 graduate of Elon University with a BS in Marketing. While working at Thomasville Furniture Company, he developed an appreciation for the maintenance field and says he's been an engineer at heart ever since. As business developer at DP Solutions, he helped more than 500 businesses implement computerized maintenance management software programs. Joel served as a Maintenance Solutions Provider at Life Cycle Engineering and supported the growth of the MPACT Learning Center. In 2008, Joel received the Gold Award for his column in Plant Services Magazine from the American Society of Business Publications Editors. Joel has often presented at and been the keynote speaker at national and international conventions since 1998. In 2008, he was the first American to deliver the opening address at the Euro Maintenance Conference in Belgium, a meeting attended by governmental and corporate leaders from 51 nations. April 30th 2008, Joel Leonard was a part of a panel of experts that spoke in the US Senate Workforce Briefing sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness. Also later in 2008 was the first American to chair the Middle East Maintenance Managers Conference. In 2009 Joel is scheduled to speak on the Maintenance Crisis in Beijing at the FM Asia Summit.

Joel was also the first American to chair the Middle East Maintenance Managers Conference and spoke to over 200 hundred engineering leaders and technicians at the Leonard Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, Italy. In 2009, Joel won his second Gold award for his Plant Services column from ASBPE, spoke before National Facilities Management and Technology Conference and plans on speaking in Mumbai, New Delhi and will be keynoting the International Society for Automation Annual Conference in Houston, Texas in October.