Whilst Nexus Components chooses supply partners primarily based on the quality of their products, we can’t help but be doubly proud of our partnership with OTTO Engineering.

The company’s commitment to its local community is an inspiration in a news environment full of stories of outsourcing, cheap labour, and cost-cutting decisions.
On Saturday May 5th, OTTO Engineering will be opening its doors to the next generation of component makers - and offering a salary boost of over 40% to potential new recruits to show them just what a career in components manufacture has to offer.

OTTO - which supplies its range of joysticks, Hall Effect and electromechanical switches and grips to the UK via Nexus Components - aims to show the next generation the value of a career in manufacturing, and attract the best candidates to keep it at the cutting edge of component manufacture.

Based in Carpentersville, Illinois, it is the village’s largest employer, and has spent millions on environmental improvements that benefit the whole community as well as its own workforce. It has an employee retention rate of more than 90 per cent. But the challenge is to get high school graduates to stay, and to challenge the perception that manufacturing is a second-rate career.

President Tom Roeser said: “When parents or society want to motivate a young person, they often disparagingly say, ‘What are you going to do, work in a factory?’ Manufacturing companies have exacerbated the problem by often keeping manufacturing jobs as lower paying ones.
“And I’m going to show them — I will provide you a career opportunity. I want to educate people that a factory is an opportunity.”

At its Jobs Fair on May 5, OTTO will offer an increased starting pay for assembly workers of $13 an hour, and also offer a profit sharing programme for employees. Taken collectively, pay and benefits add up to $14.30 an hour, which is about a 43 percent increase.

It’s a bold and committed move by a company which started as a family business in 1961 - making switches for a single client out of founder Jack Roeser’s basement.
Jack walked away from a $32,000 a year engineering job - an enviable salary in 1961 - to set up his own business, using an oven and little jewellery files. His son, Tom, watched him as a child as he built up this business. It’s the perfect story of the American dream, and now the company is at the heart of the village of Carpentersville, which had less than 40,000 residents in the 2010 census.

The company is expanding even further, building a new $20 million technology and manufacturing centre less than a mile away from its current headquarters, which will be include space to train apprentices for career in manufacturing.

At Nexus, we are proud to sell this company’s products and confident that the company’s long term plan will continue to enable it to develop cutting-edge designs and innovations that will continue to solve the increasingly complex problems of our clients

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We’ll be featuring more of the company’s products in our news articles in the coming months - their products can be found on our website here http://www.nexuscomponents.co.uk/Manufacturers/OTTO and we recently focused on the OTTO P9M latching pushbutton, a new development in the company’s popular and reliable P9 range http://www.nexuscomponents.co.uk/News/View/P9M%20Latching%20Pushbutton/19