Case studies : Mechanical engineer at Petrofac: Stuart Buchan

Stuart Buchan is a mechanical engineer within the mechanical services team at Petrofac. Before joining the company he studied MEng Mechanical Engineering.

Petrofac offers a broad range of experiences within your early years and provides excellent opportunities for development throughout your career. My aim after graduating was to continue challenging myself and gain my chartership and Petrofac offered a brilliant support system for achieving this through an accredited mentoring scheme.

Since joining Petrofac I’ve learned that opportunities are always available but you have to maintain a very pro-active attitude to work if you want to capitalise on them. Petrofac always has an ‘open door’ policy and will support you 100% if you wish to pursue something to better your career. The support system consists of your line manager, a dedicated mentor to guide you through professional development and a buddy who is always there for those queries you may want to discuss with someone on your own level.

We have been tendering to supply a motor-pump skid mounted system for a supply depot in Samawa, Iraq. There are 11 separate systems each producing different fluids which need to be off-loaded to road tankers. The scope requires us to supply a motor and pump package assembled onto a single skid with skid mounted loading arms to offload the products. This required us to review the process data submitted by the customer and then select and source the components based on the specifications. The technical information for all packages was collated and submitted in our technical proposal.

There are ample opportunities to get offshore and since Petrofac is a multi-national company there are opportunities to work overseas. I have been fortunate enough to work in Dubai as well as an offshore trip to the North Sea.

The social aspect of working at Petrofac has been brilliant. Since day one huge efforts have been made to welcome the graduates into the company by organising after work drinks. The annual dinner dance this year was an incredible event and showed how much Petrofac values its employees by spending huge amounts of time, money and effort on organising it.

Coming in as a graduate I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of the type of work that would come my way. And even now, you have to be pretty flexible within your role to take on various types of work. Let’s just say I didn’t expect to be working overseas within my first few months so it has definitely exceeded any expectations I did have!