Choosing a career can be one of life’s more difficult decisions, but for Janis Bite, of Sudbury, nothing could have been easier.

“You do what you love,” says Janis (pronounced Yani), a 29-year-old heavy equipment mechanic at Atlas Copco Construction and Mining in Sudbury.

“I was seven or eight when I began working on old cars with my dad and I just kept at it.

It was something I was good at and enjoyed doing. I knew this was what I wanted to do right from the get-go.”

Today, Janis troubleshoots and repairs rock drilling equipment, load-haul-dump machines, trucks and other mining and construction equipment for customers across North America.

Born and raised in Sudbury, Janis joined Atlas Copco, a Swedish multinational, right out of high school but left after a few months to take a one-year heavy equipment mechanics course at Centennial College in Toronto.

The bright lights were appealing at first, but the novelty wore off after a few months.

Northern lifestyle
“That’s when I learned to appreciate the North,” he recalls. “In Sudbury, I could go snowmobiling and ATVing. And I could work on my cars. I couldn’t do any of that in Toronto.”

Janis had a job waiting for him at Atlas Copco when he returned home, and he’s never looked back. Next year, he celebrates his tenth year with the company.

It doesn’t get much better than being paid to do something you love. And paid well. Heavy equipment mechanics start at $18 an hour right out of school and can make $70,000 to $80,000 a year with five or ten years of experience, he says.

Aside from the money, though, there’s the personal satisfaction of making these mining behemoths hum.

“There’s a new challenge every day,” he says. “You’re always doing something different.”

Earlier in his career, he did emergency repairs on customer sites in North Carolina, Boston, northern Quebec and on Vancouver Island.

Now, though, with a wife, a three-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son, travel has lost its appeal.

The work requires some degree of physical strength, but power tools and cranes do much of the heavy lifting, while computers are used for parts inventories, to write reports and to diagnose equipment problems.

Career planning
Janis says he was an average student in high school, who “enjoyed spending time with his friends and doing extracurricular activities after school.” He says he never really gave much thought to career planning and was never really pressured to be anything other than be a mechanic by family, friends and teachers.

His father, a geologist, was content that he “was doing something with (his) life.”

As for advice, Janis urges would-be mechanics to go to college.

“Not a lot of places will hire you right out of high school, “ says Janis. “They want you to have at least a college diploma.”

High school students, he suggests, should also check out co-op opportunities. “That helps them decide what they want to do.”

Janis works a five-day week, from 7 am to 3 pm, and gets four weeks vacation. In his spare time, he takes advantage of the outdoors and enjoys working on his 1972 Corvette and 1967 Chevy Nova.

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