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Life After HP: Deb Pedrazzi Skilled for Survival
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Back in 2005, when she was working as a quality assurance test engineer at the Spit Brook Road facility in Nashua, N.H., it never occurred to Deb Pedrazzi that her 17-year career with the HP would end anytime soon. She had "survived" the Compaq-HP merger and things seemed to be going well with her 170-member CASL (Clusters and AdVFS Systems Lab) team. "I was very comfortable," she says. Then the unthinkable happened. The division was sold to another company and she and her colleagues were out of jobs.
"HP gave us plenty of notice, as well as outplacement support, so we had time to look around," Pedrazzi said. But after five months of unemployment, she admits, "I was getting very nervous."
During her period of unemployment, Pedrazzi took advantage of free training that HP made available, taking Java Development courses at Boston University. "That was a great benefit, and added a new skill set to my resume."
And that training probably helped her land her next job as a quality assurance test engineer at Kronos, a Chelmsford-based company that develops timing software solutions such as time and attendance clocks in the workplace. Pedrazzi says that there is a "very different feel" working in a small company of 3,000 people. "My job here is more end-to-end. Because the company is small, I am involved in the whole process," she says.
Like most people who have left HP, Pedrazzi has kept up some of the friendships developed at Digital, Compaq and HP. She meets with a few former HP colleagues regularly at the gym and on the bike trail.
She goes to the gym about five days a week and bikes approximately 40 miles a week during the good weather, often along the rail trail from Ayer, Mass., to Nashua, N.H. "Working out at the gym and bike riding are my stress relievers," she says. In addition, she belongs to a local book club and is learning to cook Indian cuisine.
She lives in Ayer, Mass., with her husband Bob. They have two grown children; a daughter who is a nursing student at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and a son who graduated from Northeastern University and is now a firefighter and paramedic in Atlanta, Ga.
21 November 2008
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