Our People: Europe

Every graduate expects to be rewarded in their chosen career. But I suppose it depends what you expect by rewards. I mean, a lot of my friends from university are doing things like working in London in finance. All they're looking to do is make money for a company, and that's fine, as far as it goes. But I think that, as an engineer, the rewards are more, well, rewarding. When you're an engineer, you're able to see your ideas properly come to life, and actually have an impact on people's lives. I design components for aircraft, and I know that that component and that aircraft could be put to many different uses: it could be transporting aid to strife-torn countries, say, or taking people on holiday. And, by increasing the efficiency of an aircraft, we're helping to reduce its carbon footprint, which is good for all of us.

Rewards and challenges go hand in hand – and that's because we do a lot of problem solving, whether dealing with scope challenges and technical specification evolutions, to developing and conducting tests to ensure the product meets customer requirements. There's always plenty to do, and each member of a particular project is given a substantial amount of work to manage on his or her own. Not in a bad way: this level of responsibility is very, very rewarding, and there's always support on hand in the form of regular project reviews.

In the first whole project I was involved with, I was given the qualification testing to conduct and manage on my own. We were up against a tight deadline, with a lot of non-recurring costs associated to the project. But, thanks to some hard work, I was able to present the completed report to the customer, which was satisfying for me personally, and visibly financially rewarding for us.

There's a lot to take on and learn whenever we approach a new project. Moog designs and produces very complex components. We lead the way in flight control systems. Our components are like onions: on the face of it, all very simple but, as you peel back the layers it gets more complicated and challenging – to the extent that it can make you cry, if you're not expecting it! Learning about those components is a challenge in itself. I learn something new every day, and see a performance characteristic I'd not noticed before. These are the challenges that keep the job interesting.