Civil Engineering
Andy Parkin
Civil Engineering (1996)
During my studies I took a year in industry in a design office. This helped me to realise to which part of the industry I was most suited to and I realised that work in the construction side with its balance of both office and site work suited me better. I enjoy working in the construction industry; the satisfaction of completing a job and seeing an end product makes the hours and hard work all worthwhile.
I got my first job initially through the milk rounds with Kier construction. As a graduate scheme, this required a bit of travelling around but I found that the practical element of my UoB course meant that I had many of the skills already and was perhaps better equipped than some graduates entering from more classroom-based courses.
I was glad that I chose to work with a large company because it gave me lots of experience from working on larger Civils jobs, which I found very interesting and I would recommend this route. The only drawback was the need to be flexible enough to move locations. Otherwise graduates can find work from local build jobs if they are interested in the build element of the industry.
I changed companies in order to work more locally in Brighton and have been working now as a Senior Engineer for Amec for 3 years. I'm currently in charge of all Civil Engineering on a Combined Sewerage Overflow scheme for Southern Water. Roles include: design coordinator (design and build contract), directing work to foremen, supervising and planning crane lifts, planning works (method, plant, materials, programming, client liaison, council liaison, EA liaison), quality checks, labour allocation and engineering checks.
As can be seen from the above list, I am a little over busy and the 12 hour days take it out of you. The working hours are generally too long in this industry and you are normally required to travel around. Relatively for the hours, the pay isn't that great either but the work is varied and interesting, with daily challenges, and you have a nice balance of office and site work.
At the moment the job market is quite buoyant and so finding work locally is relatively easy. The only time it gets lacking in jobs is during a recessions when the money for building is no longer there. The next step for me would be to become a Site Agent in charge of a construction site, with a larger team underneath me.
Richard Bartlett
MEng Civil Engineering (1990)
While I was at university I worked for East Sussex County Council as an assistant resident engineer and I worked for what was then Southern Water. My time at ESCC on site was very interesting, as was my experience with Southern Water. It helped guide me into the choice I had to make as to the field of engineering I wanted to pursue which was as a buildings structural designer working in the private sector.
Both summer jobs were an invaluable eye-opener to what happens in a real design office and on a site. I would very strongly recommend every student to work two summers like this.
I think the main benefit from the MEng course (which back in 1986-90 was run jointly between the Civil and Electrical Engineering departments), was that it gave me an early appreciation of the benefits of a multi-disciplinary approach to design. Also, the course was of interest to potential employers as it was quite unique at that time. The course was certainly a deciding factor in my securing a job with a company (Ove Arup and Partners) who previously had never employed graduates from polytechnics. I also believe that some of the principals of project management taught on the course were useful and this has served me well when I have been a project manager on numerous projects to keep focus on the key issues. The exposure to project management thinking and practise thus gave a better appreciation of what a design PM was trying to do when running projects when I was working under design PM's as a graduate.
The one area that has always stood me in good stead was the structural engineering. Admittedly, I excelled at this discipline during college but the good teaching in this field gave me a real head start over other graduates. Since then, I became a MIStructE, which is not an easy qualification to obtain.
When I graduated in the early 90s, I started work with Ove Arup and Partners in a multi-disciplinary building engineering design office in London working on varied projects from 100 year old refurbishment to prestigious museums, conference facilities and the more mundane retail and office developments. Many of these projects were for overseas clients and locations, from Europe to South East Asia , although as a young graduate I did not always get the chance to make a trip to the sites.
I was eventually (after some self marketing on my part) fortunate to be able to transfer to one of their overseas projects in Bangkok, albeit it was a major civil project not a building which I had been more used to. I believed that working overseas would be a way to get accelerated promotion, responsibility etc. I was right - when I worked in Bangkok back in 1993 I was still quite lowly, but I was the right hand man to the in-country liaison manager for the biggest privately funded mass transit project in the world at that time. That sort of exposure really gets your learning cap on. The biggest sacrifice of course is being away from family in the UK .
I had a second tour of duty with Arups as the design manager and structural steelwork site engineer for a major car plant again in Thailand which last for two and a half years.
Once this project was completed I returned to the UK but found life a bit slow so I decided to make a move back to Thailand and to look at changing company as Arups did not have a suitable role for me in Thailand at that time.
I did the rounds with my CV on a job-seeking holiday there, and picked up a job with Scott Wilson as a Senior Engineer. I had the plan that by developing my role and the business over there, one day I would be able to run the Thailand operation and after a few years of hard work and self-sacrifice in working very long hours and weekend, I succeeded in promotion to General Manager.
I've been in my role as GM for 2 years now. The best thing is being the boss, or conversely, being able to run the business following my own plans, ideas and management style rather than someone else's.
I like the business development side of my job, trying to win new projects. It's very rewarding to secure a big new project. Major projects keep my team busy and allows me to employ the staff I want. As such, I now have a really good team of people (almost 100) who I like to feel responsible for and who appreciated the work I do. This means we all have gainful employment and at the end of the day, a good salary and good bonuses. This is really important to keep morale high in the team. A well-motivated team can really perform well, and not just with the enticement of money, but a feeling of belonging to a family, which is my style. I guess it's this management side of the job that I really enjoy.
I also like the fact that I can still work on some projects in an engineering capacity and thus keep my hand in on interesting projects. The thing I dislike the most are the accounting and financial reporting as well as general administration. After all, I am an engineer and a manager first and foremost. I also don't like all the travelling. It may sound exciting to be off to far flung places in the world on business class and 5 star hotels but you miss the comforts of home and family. You have to remember you are not on holiday but that you have a job to do.
As to the future, our business in Thailand is continuing to develop and we are now expanding and strengthening our role throughout South East Asia . I prefer not to be a regional director, because I much prefer to run an office and to be close to my staff, so I might stay where I am, as a General Manager, for the foreseeable future. I plan to retire in Thailand , although this is still a long way off - I'm only 42.