Jonathan Groeger Faith, Patience, and Persistence U pon hearing the news that the New Orleans
shipyard where Jonathan Groeger worked was set to close, he desperately began looking for work. He sent out résumés anywhere and everywhere.
Just when Jonathan felt like he wasn’t having any luck with his job search, he received a call from a professional recruiter with Express Employment Professionals. That call changed Jonathan’s outlook.
Express had a machine shop client looking for an engineer and they needed to hire someone as soon as possible. The recruiter called to discuss the position and set up an interview that same day with Jonathan.
“To my surprise, not long after I arrived at the interview, they were saying the job is here–do you want it?” Jonathan said. “It was the perfect job for me because I love working in a machine shop. Taking a raw product and turning it into a finished one–with so much detail, so much thought going into it, and seeing it come to fruition–is very gratifying.”
After seven months on the job, Jonathan was hired on full time.
Jonathan grew up in the small town of Denham Springs, Louisiana. Both his father, a pipe fitter, and his mother, a nurse, taught him the value of hard work and achieving one’s goals.
“My parents always taught me to work for what I want. My first purchase was a Super Nintendo,” he said. “The deal was that my brother and I would come up with half the cost. We did, and my parents came up with the other half.”
Growing up in a Christian household, his parents also taught him to have faith in God. “God’s going to put you on the path that He has designed for you,” Jonathan said. “To get the news that your employer is going to lay off thousands of people and close the whole thing down, you’ve really got to have faith in God at times like that.”
He also recalls learning an important lesson of patience and persistence from his mom. In third grade, Jonathan asked his mother if he could play the saxophone. “She thought it was just a phase and told me if I still felt that way in a year, I’d get music lessons,” he said.
Jonathan waited patiently. After a year had passed, he approached his mother again. “So, are we going to get saxophone lessons or what?” he asked.
He says the decision to take saxophone lessons influenced his life in ways he could not have imagined. He stuck with music and played the saxophone in junior high, high school, and college.
The persistence Jonathan had in playing the saxophone was the same persistence he relied upon to press forward in his job search. He also credits the Express recruiter for getting his career started at the machine shop. “Express was a crucial link between where I am now and where I was at the shipyard,” he said. “If the recruiter hadn’t found my résumé, I don’t know where I’d be.”
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