Looking back on my working life two things strike me: I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have always managed to get paid to do things that I would actually spend my own time doing; and secondly that being in the IET gives me a genuine sense of pride. Not in a big headed, “I’m the great I am” way, but as a quiet achievement after putting in a lot of spade work.
I left school at 16 to work at British Steel, Rotherham. It was great to be earning a wage, but after a while I was frustrated at not knowing where the various engineering formula came from. So after a while I managed to get enough qualifications to get into Dundee University to study physics and then to get a job at the UKAEA in Cheshire where I really began to get into modelling, simulation programming & control (let’s call it MSP&C) in a big way. After that I worked for various firms in Fife and Cambridgeshire doing MPS&C across a number of industries.
Now the point about that is not that my “career” has been some kind of predicable monotonic climb into the dizzying heights of senior management because it hasn’t. However, what my degree and my first graduate job did is to refine and reinforce two core ideas:
• How to think for myself about doing science and technology.
• The importance of enjoying and applying the basics - in my case physical science and systems thinking.
With that in mind, my MO has always been that with a bit of luck and enthusiasm you could always get a job you actually wanted to get out of bed to do. Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been around since 1943, but it still has a resonance in that while we all generally need to put a roof over our heads and food on the table, it’s getting a bit of the old actualisation that puts a smile on our faces.
I now work as a freelance MSP&C contractor and consultant which is both scary (food & roof) and exciting (actualisation). Looking back to when I was 16 in 1979, a fair few of the working people I saw going to and from work on the bus looked fed-up and tired, which is a genuine shame. I can honestly say I enjoy what I do, and it is great to be a member of a forward looking and diverse IET.
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