Engineer a Career

Danny never planned on being an engineer. He wanted to be a footballer, got pointed at engineering by a maths teacher, was knocked back from mechanical at Strathclyde, and was rejected from around 40 internship applications before SSE said yes. Three years out of university he is now working on HVDC control and protection at Hitachi Energy’s new Glasgow office, on the technology connecting offshor...

Engineering should be a career that everyone can see themselves in, girls and boys, women and men. Right now, it isn’t. Women make up just 17% of the UK’s engineering and technology workforce. In this solo episode, Josh looks at where girls and women are lost to engineering, from the subjects they choose at school to the careers they leave. He also explains why industry has to show up much earlier...

In episode 69, Hayyaan joins Josh to share how great tech teachers and a school Lego club sparked his interest in engineering, why one open day settled his choice of degree, and what it was like learning anatomy at Ninewells Hospital and sitting at the controls of a Da Vinci surgical robot. They talk about founding Dundee's first biomedical engineering society, becoming a J.P. Morgan tech bran...

Episode 68 of the Engineer a Career Podcast, with Josh joined by TJ Scott, a Formula One engineer and fellow Glasgow Caledonian University alumnus. TJ grew up building fast, unlikely cars with his dad in the family workshop. That was where he first asked how you take something that works and design it properly on paper before cutting any metal. School didn't go to plan. His route through educa...

Professor Weijia Yuan, who is part of the University of Strathclyde's Applied Superconductivity Laboratory, joins Josh again to explain how superconducting cables can already replace copper in the grid at a fraction of the volume, why the real barrier isn't the technology but the economics, and where the UK could build a manufacturing capability rather than just watch this happen elsewhere...

Professor Weijia Yuan, who is part of the University of Strathclyde's Applied Superconductivity Laboratory, joins Josh to explain how superconducting magnets, not the fusion reaction itself, are becoming fusion energy's hardest engineering problem, and why the next decade could see the first real fusion electricity hit the grid. This is Episode one of the Superconducting Machines & Sys...

Every engineer's instinct is to chase efficiency: more power, better shapes, cleaner numbers. Adarsh Bhardwaj thinks that instinct is exactly what's holding the renewables sector back. In this special episode, Josh is joined by Adarsh, an engineer turned entrepreneur and founder of Regeno, the deep tech startup building a plug-and-play wind turbine that can be installed and maintained with...

Josh sat down with Ryan to talk through his journey from the wee computer guy fixing the school projector to co-founding an AI advisory business, and how a career in software engineering shaped the way he now thinks about the biggest question in the industry. What stands out about Ryan's story is that the through-line was never really the code. It was the problem solving. From jailbreaking his...

Applications open in weeks. The people who get the internships, placements and graduate roles are the ones who are ready before they do. In the last of four episodes for the new academic year, Josh shares what he'd tell any engineering student or graduate going after a jobTreat getting the job like a module and give it time every week. Build a base CV and tailor it to every role. Get in early,...

The simplest habit in this episode is the one you'll wish you'd started sooner. Sixteen years ago, in his first job, Josh was told to keep a notepad. He still does over 25 of them now, filled with notes from across his career. When it came to becoming a chartered engineer, those notebooks were the record he built his whole submission from. This episode is about starting yours. Not a tidy d...

Josh is back with more steps to build your way to a career in engineering. This one's about the skills you already have and aren't talking about. You go to university or college, you get the degree but the part-time job, the society, the volunteering, the side project are all building capabilities employers want. Most students undersell them, or forget they count at all. Josh breaks down w...

Episode 60 of the Engineer a Career Podcast, with Josh going solo at the start of a new academic year to reflect on his own engineering degree what he got right, and what he would do differently. Josh started his degree at Glasgow Caledonian University in 2010 and has since gone on to become a chartered engineer, a project manager, and a business owner. He walks through the decisions that shaped t...

Josh sat down with Ryan to talk through his journey from electrical apprentice to chartered engineer, and how he ended up working as a senior project manager in Perth, Australia. What stands out about Ryan's story is that nobody handed him the way in. He failed physics twice at school and never considered university an option. When he couldn't get an apprenticeship, he did a pre-apprentice...

It's Episode 58, and it's time to share what it's really like being a member of one of our strategic partners, the Energy Institute. Ubong Essien is a PhD researcher at the University of Strathclyde and Secretary of the Energy Institute Young Professional Network. He studied mechanical engineering in Nigeria, where apprenticeships were not a common route into the profession and univers...

Emma joined Network Rail in 2019 as a technical clerk, providing admin support to a team of civil engineers. She had no engineering background, she'd left school in 2000 with Highers in languages, and her route since had taken her through two unfinished degrees and a series of admin and call centre roles. A senior asset engineer asked whether she'd ever considered becoming an engineer. Emm...

Episode 56 of the Engineer a Career Podcast, with Josh joined by John Casey. John Casey started his engineering career at 16, spending eight weeks of work experience at a wind farm in southwest Scotland after bombing his fourth-year exams and pouring everything into boxing. Nine years on, he's a senior engineer who's returned to that very same wind farm, this time delivering its extension....

Katie started her engineering career at 18, turning down a university place to take an apprenticeship at Jacobs, a decision she had to make before she'd even sat her Highers. Eleven years on, she's a Chartered Engineer who's worked on site at Grangemouth, spent nine months on assignment in Malaysia, and built her career the earning-and-learning way. In this episode, recorded back at GC...

It's International Women in Engineering Day 2026 and this year we are so excited to introduce our guest Jessica Gagen. Jessica is an aerospace sales engineer at Gulfstream Aerospace, a Miss England and Miss World UK winner, and one of the most visible STEM advocates in the country. Her route into engineering didn't follow a straight line, it went through a modeling career, a supermarket sh...

Josh sits down with Mamta Singhal MBE, who found her calling early, taking apart plugs and mechanisms as a child long before she knew the word "engineer." Inspired by James Dyson and a Tom Hanks film about a toy designer, she set herself a single goal: to engineer the things that make children smile. She studied product design engineering at Glasgow University and the Glasgow School of A...

What does it actually take to build a career in engineering when the path is anything but straight? In this episode, Josh sits down with Susan Ipri-Brown, immediate past president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, one of the oldest engineering institutions in the world. From a grandfather who never doubted she'd follow him into the profession, to internships at General Motors, t...

Paul is an independent consultant working at the nexus of public and private heat networks, having most recently spent five years at Vattenfall and, before that, a long career at Whitby Bird and Ramboll. His route in started early, a grandfather he knew as an engineer without ever learning what he did, an uncle's stories over slabs of Irn Bru, a laser lab in Liverpool, and a week of work exper...

Episode 50. Two years, 56 guests. There's no straight line into engineering. In this milestone solo episode, recorded at the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland (NMIS), Josh shares the four things 49 conversations have taught him about how people actually build careers in engineering, why the routes in matter far less than what you do once you're there, and why there's never been...

Tobias is a renewable energy engineer, founder of Embodied, and one of the most layered guests we've had on the podcast. His career has taken him from Germany to Sweden, the United States, China, Norway and now Scotland — through solar cell research at Fraunhofer, hydrogen compressor development, and into his own boutique engineering consultancy. But the most interesting part of his story isn&...

Jack Chalkley joins The Engineer a Career Podcast to share what a career in construction actually looks like from the inside and how a project director gets built one project at a time. Jack is a Project Director and Scotland Healthcare Lead at AECOM, where he leads multidisciplinary delivery across some of the country's most complex social infrastructure projects. His route in wasn't plan...

Josh sat down with Josh Murchie to talk through his journey into aerospace engineering and how he ended up working at GE Aerospace Caledonian in Prestwick. What stands out about Josh's story is that it isn't a straight line. At 17, he made it to the final stage of the GE apprenticeship he'd dreamed of since doing work experience there as a school pupil and didn't get it. From there...