Consider the client
Trying to figure out the best road to take out of university? I’m a civil engineering graduate at Severn Trent Water, and this is why you should consider working for a client organisation instead of following the crowd into engineering consultancy.
How many of your friends are thinking of working for a big-name engineering consultancy? How many of them have really thought about what they’re doing? Because they are sleepwalking into an option that is convenient. But there is another way. Which I am going to tell you about. Only read though on if you want to be different, and see engineering in the bigger picture.
Atkins, MottMacDonald, Skanska, Arup. These are the engineering design consultants working on the biggest projects which get the most attention. And when searching for jobs post-university these are the easy employers to aim for. But part of the challenge of moving into the working world is about deciding what to work on. Which, if you’re an engineer, is why you should consider all the companies involved in delivering projects.
Most engineering projects are built on behalf of someone — the client — while being designed by a consultant, and constructed by a contractor. In civil engineering the client may be a water company like Severn Trent, Network Rail, the Environment Agency or a city authority. The client is paying for the project with money from customers, investors, or government.
When leaving university I knew I had broader interests than just pure engineering — I wanted to learn about and get involved in the financial, operational and customer service sides of whatever company I was joining.
Which is why I joined Severn Trent Water on their engineering graduate scheme. As an engineer you are embedded in an organisation that has many functions, and its engineering scheme lets you get exposure to these at the same time as progressing towards chartership. We are a FTSE 100 company with all the reporting requirements that entails, managing a complex engineering system, while satisfying the demands of three regulators — so the possibilities for learning are great.
Severn Trent has a £2bn programme of investment over the next five years to improve service to customers. This includes new pipes and boreholes to make Birmingham’s water supply more resilient, building advanced sewage treatment plants to better protect the environment, and installing renewable energy technologies. Graduates are involved in all of them. Personally I am managing a £3.3m batch of surge vessel replacements (steel tanks on the water distribution network) and a major repair scheme to one of our reservoirs.
The company works very closely with its consultants and contractors, in the same offices in fact. Severn Trent recognises that you need to gain detailed design experience in order to gain chartership, and so secondments with consultants and contractors within our supply chain are fully supported. One of the benefits of joining Severn Trent is that you can gain this range of experience without the hassle of changing employer— HR will do the secondment admin for you.
I joined Severn Trent as one of five engineering graduates, and one of twenty-seven new graduates in total, and we are looking for more. Joining with this many means you get to meet a spectrum of people, and make friends working in every part of the business from operational support to social media strategy. There is real zeal in the people higher up in the organisation for all graduates to get involved in extracurricular activities. I have redesigned a fat-trap and presented to the company’s executive, put forward ideas to improve the internal HR call centre.
And finally I have never had a week where I have been in the same office everyday, whereas friends at consultant’s head offices have never left it in 9 months. If that’s not a good reason to join Severn Trent then I’m not sure what is.
