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Systems engineer: Alex

This Case Study belongs to Electronics engineer.

I started in Atkins back in 2005 having been about a year and a half out of university. I'd spent a year doing a very electronics based job and was looking for something a little more high level with a view to moving into the project management side of the engineering. I'd given my CV to a number of recruitment agencies and Atkins contacted me looking for a graduate with some experience to join their growing team.

I initially joined a large project team working on an assessment phase for an armoured vehicle replacement programme and the work that I was involved in was still focused on the electronics side of things, but was a lot broader than anything I'd done before. This included requirements analysis, modelling, radio systems and human factors, and crew station design analysis, as well as some satisfying trials works standing in a snow covered field somewhere on Salisbury Plain, while being shot at, all in the name of assessing the electronic architecture of a prototype vehicle.

After this long, but varied stint looking at the command, control, communications, computing and information systems elements of the armoured vehicle programme, I spent some time doing some programme planning and options studies, which was what I thought I was going to move towards. As it turns out, in the 21 months I've been at Atkins my vision for where I want to take my career has changed. I'm now more interested in moving towards the technical management route, but Atkins has been flexible enough to accommodate that and I'm currently looking forward to challenges that lie ahead of me in that arena.

Since then I've been on a three-month secondment in Whitehall, London, working on marketing and communications within the higher echelons of the Ministry of Defence and managed to forge a position for myself within Atkins looking at high level systems architectures with an understanding of modelling and enterprise architectures that has allowed me to work on a number of fascinating programmes that look at communications capability across the Ministry of Defence.

I think the best thing about the work I do is that I can be sure that it will always be interesting. In the rare instances where it hasn't been, I try to remember that the tasks I'm involved in are often short term. As my friends always say, it sounds like I change job every three months, which certainly keeps you on your toes and allows you to build a broad range of experience founded in both domain and sector knowledge.

My advice to anyone coming into the industry is to be prepared to learn a lot and not be worried that you may never use the knowledge that you establish when you go to university. Atkins provides an opportunity to work in all the different areas of the defence industry and will give you the chance to progress your career in the direction that you want to take, whether it's technical, project management or business management. You need to be prepared to be adaptable and you'll be rewarded with responsibility and interesting work.

Case Study sourced by of , 25 February 2009.