An Old After-dinner Speech

My School former students club (Old Millhillians Club) has an annual Engineers' Dinner - sadly missed this year. It is an opportunity for those of us who entered engineering, science and design to catch-up with each other to discuss school, current lives and careers. Informal networking but really an opportunity for a good meal and some good wine in a very nice London restaurant.

In addition to the "grown-ups" a number of current students with an inerest in an engineering career are invited to attend under the care of a watchful member of staff lest they are distracted from our inspirational conversation by the free-flowing alcohol!

In truth they have always turned out to be far more confident and knowledgeable about what may lie ahead for themselves professionally than I ever was. A couple of years ago I was asked to give an after dinner speech which I rediscovered whilst rummaging through my chaotic directories. I have copied it down here as it may provide useful for someone struggling with trying to work through unemployment or feeling that they should have more direction or success. All I can say is do what you can and just try to carry on carrying on.

As it turned out, Dyson was not to be my last employer either...

Why?

The title I've written at the top of this is “Why?”

This covers a range of thoughts and emotions.

Why did Gordon ask me to do this?

Why did I agree?

Why did I drink so much beforehand?

More on-topic why am I an engineer and doing what I'm doing?

Two potential options:

1.???Pretend that it was all planned, that I had always intended to be doing what I am doing and had organised my life to achieve it

2.?????Admit that this is all a bit of a mystery and see if this will act as a form of therapy

So, option 2 it is.

First of all, my dad is an engineer. Agricultural equipment, civil engineering and telecommunications engineering. That's what you could do in the “good old days”. Apparently.

He offered me no encouragement and is still hoping that I'll become a doctor or lawyer.

So what do I mean by this? Engineering lacked prestige and still does to some extent despite millionaire nerds like Elon Musk. So you have to want to do it. So, I must have wanted to do it!

Why? I liked to know how things worked. I thought aeroplanes and space ships were cool and I didn't like the thought of spending time with sick people or criminals.

That led me to a degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, which does actually qualify as rocket science. I enjoyed university life. Sports. Friends. Socials. I didn't enjoy my degree so much. Not as a whole. A lot of it was utterly dull. Some of it though, some of it I really enjoyed. The question was therefore how to find a job doing the bits I liked and not the bits that I didn't.

Two summers of work experience helped me decide.

One at GEC-Marconi. A huge British defence avionics company. Now defunct. I learned here that I didn't really want to work in a big company. The idea of working for years on a project that might not see the light of day and being a small cog in a very big machine didn't appeal. That, of course, was my personal experience and was almost certainly informed by an early education in an unruly and determinedly non-conformist school.

The other placement was in TOMs GB a small race team in the flatlands of Norfolk. Also, now long since gone. Here I learned that I enjoyed working in a small team doing all manner of different things that I could see made in a matter of weeks. I also, as it turned out, rather liked racing cars.

Easy then. All I had to do was find a job designing racing cars. The only problem with that was that seems to be something that everyone wants to do. I learned that in trying to get my summer placement. That meant that I actually had to work really hard, writing to any and every motorsports team I could find both here and abroad. As you can imagine, that sort of commitment doesn't come naturally to a Mill Hillian. We have to try and make it look easy. Naturally I did apply to big engineering companies through their graduate recruitment schemes. That was relatively straightforward, but I didn't really want those jobs.

What I did learn was that my academic attainment would be taken for granted, that you have to work hard if demand exceeds supply and the thing that would most likely get you the job was already having some pertinent work experience. Luckily, that's something I had prepared earlier but only because my parents had funded me for the unpaid internship at TOM’s.

However, that got me started at Reynard Motorsport as a graduate engineer. Reynard is also now closed. A rather worrying trend developing there. Regardless, I realised that boundless enthusiasm and an ability to not upset the workshop technicians and race mechanics were my greatest assets. After a few months in various departments I ended up as an aerodynamicist doing one of the things I had enjoyed at university and was soon running my own projects with real, live, clients paying large sums of money for results. To this day I don't know if that was down to competence or a lack of other staff but I took the opportunity to work on vehicle projects from road cars to NASCAR pick-up trucks to Indycars to Le Mans cars. I then took the opportunity to move to a company being set up by the chief designer of one of the cars that I had worked on for another Le Mans project (picture above). Then someone who had worked with a colleague of mine offered me a job at Aston Martin, so I went there to design road cars before being invited to work in a new company being set up in Italy working on Formula 1 development.

I had found myself in a situation, still in my 20s when I thought that it was normal for people to offer me jobs and I had never turned down the opportunity to do something new and take a risk. The position in Italy was the first time that I paused. Not because I didn't speak Italian or because the thought of living abroad worried me. It was because I'd met a girl and I was no longer living life just to suit myself. I went anyway though and as it turns out we eventually got married and have stayed married. I still do not know if this is because of or despite my time abroad.

At some point priorities change and so does your luck. Mine changed when I came back to the UK expecting to start in a new racing team that never got off the ground due to a recession. That meant that I couldn't find any work for almost half a year. I had to start applying for jobs again. Sell the relevance of my skill-set to people who didn't know me and didn’t know someone who had worked with me. I did eventually get the hang of it and found myself in an engineering consultancy on-site at Airbus. Doing the thing that I hadn't wanted to do at university. As it turned out, I did quite enjoy it due to the fact that I was working for a relatively small external team. So that's how my second career started as an engineering consultant working primarily in aerospace and moving from hands on design, test and development to simulation and process. A reinvention. Freelancing in the aerospace sector.

Until another recession and another reinvention. This time into the Jaguar Land Rover. Back to automotive aerodynamics but also aeroacoustics. Yet another new field to get my head around.

Until my latest (and perhaps final?) job at Dyson, designing cars not vacuum cleaners. A start up within a big company. A job that I was suggested for by a former colleague from motorsport. A job which I took over other potential roles in Germany and China because now I'm not only married but I have a daughter at school and an elderly father to think about. Actually, I understand that my dad doesn't really want me to be a doctor or lawyer any more but he asks anyway!

So the answer to the question why? Well, why not?