2006 Report to the Community Annual Report

Employee of the Year: Serzh Nikolayev

Machinist, musician, and technical wizard, 2006 Employee of the Year Serzh Nikolayev is a man of many talents. His story spans two continents and a colorful career leading to The Lighthouse for the Blind.

Serzh grew up in Azerbaijan in the former Soviet Union. Though he was born with macular degeneration, he was not diagnosed as legally blind until age 13. The macula is responsible for central vision, and erodes over time in people with macular degeneration. Today, Serzh has no remaining central vision but retains his peripheral vision.

Growing up, he discovered a passion for all things mathematical and technical. He attended a local electrical & technical engineering college. Upon graduating, he accepted a job with the county police department repairing alarm systems.

While working as a technician, Serzh pursued his passion for music on the side.  He is an accomplished musician, playing keyboards and several types of guitar. When pressures in the police department to join the Communist Party became too much to bear, music provided a way out. Serzh left the police department and became a full-time professional musician. He traveled the countryside with a group of fellow musicians around the Soviet Union playing at weddings, banquets, and concert halls.

Serzh toured with his band until starting work in a concrete block factory in 1989. Political and civil unrest had been growing steadily and war broke out between local factions shortly thereafter. He fled Azerbaijan to Moscow with his wife Natalie and son Roman shortly after the start of the civil war.

As the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, the U.S. and Soviet governments agreed to allow refugees to immigrate to America for the first time ever. On May 9, 1991, Serzh and ten of his family members arrived in Seattle. A stream of relatives soon followed. Today Serzh has 65 family members living mostly in the Renton area. After living and working in the United States for many years, Serzh became a citizen in 1997.

We all know the barriers that face people with visual disabilities searching for work, for Serzh this was compounded by the fact that he did not speak English . The immigration office researched the options for Serzh and found the Lighthouse.   He started work here on August 12, 1991 three months after arriving in the U.S.

The Lighthouse provided Serzh with an interpreter eight hours a day for the first two weeks of employment. While he did not take formal English classes, Serzh became fluent in English little by little with the help of his Lighthouse colleagues.

In 1998, Serzh transferred from production work to the Lighthouse machine shop.  He immediately took to the job, enjoying both the mental challenge and the opportunity to hone his technical skills.

He continues to sharpen his technical abilities, recently completing over 45 online Tooling University classes. Thanks to his commitment to constantly improving his machining proficiency, Serzh is one of our premiere CNC machinists.

As The Seattle Lighthouse’s Employee of the Year, Serzh is also our nominee for the National Industries for the Blind (NIB) Peter J. Salmon Career Achievement Award. This honor is given for leadership in the blindness field to a blind employee working in a direct labor position for a NIB associated agency.  Serzh will represent the Seattle Lighthouse at the NIB National Convention in Chicago, Illinois this fall.

“I appreciate winning the award because it lets me know that my coworkers respect me,” Serzh says. “People here ¾ I feel like they’re family. I come to work and it’s like my home here.”

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