This isn't my first encounter with the Queen Elizabeth aircraft
carrier project. I originally spent six months with the whole ship
assembly team in 2009 on a graduate placement. I've come back to
work on the installation of the aircraft lifts.
My official title is Integration Manager, even though I'm still
technically on the trainee scheme. I suppose I've kind of been
fast-tracked, but part of the reason I joined Babcock was because
of this project, so I'm hardly unhappy about that.
There's been a lot to learn and very quickly. The six months of my
graduate placement was, to all intents, a crash course in
large-scale naval equipment installation. I was given packages of
some fairly complex systems to manage, and initially I just
immersed myself in understanding the system drawings, talking to
people, asking basic questions and trying to take it all in.
Fortunately, there were some vastly experienced people on hand who
were happy to explain everything. But I also had plenty of
opportunity to use my initiative.
This is such a large project that, for much of the time, you're
dealing with issues that didn't get flagged at the design phase. In
the case of the aircraft lifts, the problems surfaced when we
reached the point of actually trying to fit very large hydraulic
equipment into a very small area of ship. It's a classic, low-tech,
physical and logistical problem. There's no detailed instruction
manual, so you have to bring everyone together - the contract
managers, project managers and production teams - to thrash out all
the ideas and create your own solution.
In making that happen, I found myself acting as an intermediary,
listening to what everyone had to say and then putting together the
strategy as I saw it. The agreed solution is actually being put in
place right now. At least it should be, because it's on my
shoulders!
In my view, one of the things I think an engineer has to understand
is when to go and seek further advice. In a project like this,
there are many people with different priorities involved, and the
moment you start cutting steel you're affecting other people's
work, as well as the ship's structure. There are lots of factors to
be considered, so it's essential that you consult with everyone
concerned, and understand the wider impact of your actions before
you go ahead. Apart from anything else, it's an extraordinarily
effective learning process. You're gaining experience that will be
very useful for the future.
Graduates aren't expected just to follow convention. You're quite
free to challenge things and voice your own opinion, as long as you
can back it up with a strong technical argument. When I joined, I
can remember being told by a senior manager: 'The reason why we've
got you young guys here is to test the norm.' I thought, "If he's
telling me to suggest new ways of doing things, I'll take him at
his word."
At the moment I'm doing a Marine Technology Education Consortium
(MTEC) course, a collaboration between British universities and
industry to provide further learning to postgraduates. This
involves eight weeks of learning at home, plus a week's intensive
lecturing at university per 10-credit module.
Babcock is fantastic as far as training and development goes. If
you can identify a course that you'd really benefit from attending,
they're very good at facilitating that. And in my experience, the
day-to-day tasks that you're given really make you think about what
you're doing, to the point where you're wondering how you're going
to solve something even when you're at home doing something totally
unrelated. I'm not the only graduate to come onto this project on
their first placement, get stuck into the responsibilities and not
want to move on at the end of it. It actually happens quite
often.