Christer Eriksson recently celebrated his 50^th anniversary. Not his golden wedding anniversary, as many people would assume, but five decades as a dedicated employee of Zurich, Switzerland-based ABB, a global power and automation technology company that operates in 100 countries and employs approximately 124,000 people. After half a century of working with high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) transmission systems for the same company, it is difficult to imagine that, except for a bit of luck, the 67-year-old may not have become an engineer at all.

“I grew up on the family dairy farm in Sweden, but I knew that was not what I wanted to do with my life,” he recalled. “My father had done some research and decided I should leave home to apply for work in a large factory, so that is what I did.”

In 1960, at the age of 17, Eriksson traveled 200 miles to Ludvika, Sweden, and enrolled in an apprentice program at ABB's legacy company ASEA to learn about machine tools. But because he was a high school graduate, the human resources office asked if he would be interested in a position other than the one for which he had applied.

“I said sure, not knowing what I was getting into,” Eriksson laughed. “In those days, the company had just begun commercial exploitation of HVDC for transmission purposes, so I was assigned to the department building rectifiers for industry and railroads for the next two years.”

Because military service is compulsory in Sweden, Eriksson left ASEA to serve 18 months in the army. He returned to the company after being discharged and was offered the opportunity to enter an industrial engineering program with an emphasis on electrical.

“For the next two years, I received minimum wage payment to attend school six days a week,” he said.

Upon graduating, ASEA assigned Eriksson to a project in which he helped tie power between Sweden and Denmark. The company next asked the young engineer if would take a three-year assignment in Japan.

“That was sort of scary,” he said. “I was only in my mid-20s, and three years seemed like a lifetime. In the end, I signed on and went to Japan. I had the time of my life.”

The assignment stretched into five years, but as always, Eriksson ultimately returned to ASEA and Sweden. Once again, fate intervened.

“Walking into the company on my first day back, I ran into an old friend,” he remembered. “We chatted, and he asked what my business was. I told him I was on my way to the human resources department to get my next assignment, and my friend asked me to wait. He said he had another assignment that he would like me to consider. Before I knew it, I had signed a new contract with ASEA and moved to Los Angeles, California, to help in the rebuild of the Sylmar converter station, which had been totally destroyed in an earthquake. That is how I came to live in the United States.”

In 1980, Eriksson, who was by now married with a family, moved to Corvallis, Oregon, to work on upgrades to the Pacific Intertie HVDC system. Since the completion of that project in 1988 — around which time ASEA merged with Brown Boveri to become ABB — Eriksson has worked in numerous after-sales and business development leadership roles related to HVDC technology for the company's grid systems business. He currently is a director of business development within the company's Power Systems division, overseeing a dozen projects with utilities on the West Coast and Canada.

October 3, 2010, marked the engineer's 50-year anniversary with the company. To celebrate this rare achievement, Eriksson recently received two prestigious awards. The first, the Royal Patriotic Society of Sweden's Long and Faithful Service gold medal, came from his home country. The Swedish Ambassador presented the medal to Eriksson last Nov. 15 in a surprise celebration at the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C. The second honor, a lifetime achievement award, came from ABB at the company's annual sales meeting in Houston.

“I was totally overwhelmed by the recognition and celebration of both these events,” he said. “I am not used to this type of fanfare. I work because, after all these years, I still find my job challenging and extremely gratifying.”

As proof of this statement, Eriksson says has no plans to retire any time soon unless he can find something to do that will give him the same level of satisfaction as his career at ABB.

When asked if he would choose a different career if he knew 50 years ago what he knows now, Eriksson does not hesitate to respond.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “The technological progress I have seen in the power industry since 1960 is mind-boggling, and we continue to advance. I have witnessed the movement from vacuum tubes to transistors to microprocessors to computer-based systems. It is fantastic, and I cannot imagine what our industry will be like in the next 50 years.”