Pieces of a Puzzle: PCB Designer John Watson Sees the Big Picture of Life and Work

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

John Watson started his career in military intelligence and as an electronics repair technician but moved over to printed circuit board design at a time when the whole electronics industry was experiencing a paradigm shift.

“I wanted to be involved in electronics,” he says of those younger days. “As a technician, you used to go down to a component level on fixing things. But in the late 1990s, they began just swapping boards out. They didn't care if you went down to the component level. So, the whole area of electronics technician work changed. That's when I changed my career and went into PCB design.”

There’s a common belief, he says, “that you need a set path to get into PCB design or that maybe you have to be an engineer, but I’ve been doing this career for about 24 years now, and it’s really exciting.”

Since shifting to PCB design, John has supported the industry through his roles as a PCB designer, an instructor at Palomar College in southern California for the past three years, and as a member of a design leadership initiative through IPC.

John was introduced to IPC standards in 2000 as a student of PCB design by instructor Bill Brooks. “As we walked through the door of the classroom, he handed us IPC-2221 and 2222, and said, ‘These are your textbooks.’ That was my introduction to IPC,” John says. “I really held true to IPC as the standard of how it should be done.”

In the summer of 2023, John was invited to serve as a representative on the Design Leadership Council, led by Peter Tranitz, senior director of technology solutions, IPC Electronics Europe GmbH. “It’s a fantastic group, and I'm really glad to see this happening with IPC,” John says. “This is a very active and talented group of individuals and includes some of the greatest leaders in our industry. It’s very exciting to see.”

Continue reading this article in the Winter 2025 issue of IPC Community.