How did you find the onboarding as a Graduate?
I was given work within the first day and introduced to the company, the people I'd be working with and the company's standards. I felt the hardware package including the dual-monitor set-up, new keyboard and mouse was sufficient to get started with. Additionally the CAD standards pack provided quick reference to familiarise myself with the company's standards.
What mentor arrangements were put in place?
One of my colleagues provided a particular level of guidance in line with what I would expect from a mentor - this included answering any questions I had, showing me best practices in regards to CAD and mechanical services design.
How long have you been with the business?
1 year and 8 months.
What are your tips for success for a new Grad joining the business?
- Don't feel overwhelmed, there is a lot of information to take in with regards to designing for mechanical services, though most of it will become second-nature with experience.
- Ask a lot of questions, staff here are friendly and will answer. There may be times where you could ask an unlimited amount of questions about a concept and still not be certain, in those cases it usually is that you need more time and experience to really grasp it, and you shouldn't feel discouraged by that.
- Prioritise expertise with CAD, Excel functions and the way the CBG filing and e-mail structure work before you really get into the hows and whys of mechanical design. This will provide you the most immediate boost to your graduate skills as you'll need time to take in mechanical concepts early on.
What personal preparation would you suggest a someone does before starting?
- Practice AutoCAD (you should be able to register for the student edition using your university e-mail address), there are plenty of great resources both on YouTube and on websites. You really don't need to bother with paid learning to be good at it. The main things you need to learn are how to use the basic drawing commands, command-line shortcuts and some basic block-editor skills (and even that's a stretch), getting a handle on the 'offset', 'stretch' and 'align' commands is particularly useful early on.
- Try to get familiar with vocabulary used in building services. Many terms are used interchangeably and many terms are reused with completely different meanings depending on the context which can be difficult to keep up with a first - while there will be confusion it can be reduced with some familiarity.
Example of any challenges you had and how you were supported to overcome them during your early career stages at CBG.
When I was working on Dragon School, Oxford, I was given the task of validating pressure drop calculations for ductwork - which at that time was an entirely new concept to me, with many difficult bits of nomenclature to get around. My colleague guided me using his own table which showed me both the means of validating these calculations and indirectly introduced me to the idea that it can be convenient at times to come up with your own tables, depending on how you want to use them. He had also introduced me to the concept of pressure loss through fittings and how these impact the total calculations, which I was not then aware of.
