To celebrate Tomorrow's Engineering Week CIHT are showcasing inspiring engineers in the Highways and Transportation sector. We spoke to George Nidhish, a Associate Transport Planner at WSP about his career and how we can inspire the younger generation to consider a career in engineering.
Tomorrow’s Engineers Week aims to show that engineering careers are for everyone and hopes to inspire the diverse workforce the industry needs, here at CIHT we want to do the same.
Studying for civil engineering in India at the dawn of the millennium, there was a running joke among students that, you become an engineer first and then decide what you want to do with your life. I was the living embodiment of that joke. Whilst I’ve always had an inclination to learn how things worked, how towns, cities and transport infrastructure were planned and developed, I found my true calling as an engineer and a transport planner during my stint as a project engineer for an interior fit out company in the middle east.
A chance encounter with a British highway engineer and transport planner opened my eyes to the sustainable aspects of planning and designing highways infrastructure. The concept of shifting the policy dial away from one of ‘predict and provide’ to ‘predict and manage’ as well as ‘’decide and provide’ turned everything I’d steadfastly crammed on the eve of my engineering semester exams on its head. That road to Damascus moment went from being a full blown assault on my engineering senses to an insatiable curiosity that piqued my interest to learn more on the subject.
Suffice to say, it didn’t take too much convincing to do a masters in transport planning and engineering from an eminent university in the UK, and the rest is history.
On my day-to-day job as an engineer and a transport planner, I manage multidisciplinary projects from concept design through to planning and implementation. On many of my projects, I engage with a wide range of stakeholders including politicians, local authority officers, members of public etc to not only showcase the projects that I’m working but also to obtain valuable feedback to help inform the designs.
I work with a highly motivated team of engineers, planners, transport economists, traffic modellers, environmental specialists including ecologists, heritage specialists, landscape designers etc to deliver world class infrastructure projects to a range of clients. Depending on the type of client or the project I’m working on, I don a variety of hats for example, I might be a behavioural psychologist one day, a traffic engineer a development planner or even a transport economist on a different day.
There are a whole host of reasons why young people should consider a career in the highways and transportation sector. With a large number of major highways infrastructure projects in the pipeline including considerable funding commitment to walking and cycling infrastructure in the UK, there is a significant shortage of candidates with the right engineering skills around the country.
The sector offers aspirants interesting and challenging opportunities with a range of responsibilities including problem-solving, undertaking engineering designs and analyses using various software suites including cutting edge traffic microsimulation tools, CAD based technologies such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), project management, stakeholder engagement and many more. Engineers will have the privilege of combining analytical skills with the knowledge and experience of working on high profile projects to create future-ready solutions that will make a real difference to the lives of millions of people.
With a paucity of skilled resources, it is important that our sector is promoted as an overwhelmingly positive and exciting place to work and build a career. Tackling this will require a proactive approach to changing perceptions of working in the highways and transportation sector, broadening the demographic and cognitive diversity of our workforce and upskilling existing workers to equip them to deal with the new technological challenges that they face in their workplace.
The sector should also do more to address the imbalance in the representation of women, minority communities, as well as limited opportunities for those with disabilities to work and thrive in highways and transportation careers. Engaging with school children to help prevent gender role stereotypes in the longer term would be a great way to inspire young minds and to ‘catch them young’.
The fact that 70% of global carbon emissions can be traced back to transport puts an enormous amount of onus on the highways and transportation sector to not just do things better, but entirely revolutionise the way we have been planning, designing and building transport infrastructure over the past few decades. We need to look at everything through a low carbon lens to address the challenges around decarbonisation by tacking all stages of transport lifecycle from policy and strategy through to operation and maintenance, be it through planning for sustainable development, influencing and changing the behaviours and expectations for moving people and goods around, reusing and repurposing construction materials, making the transition from fossil fuels to electric and hydrogen fuels etc. All of these interventions can bring opportunities to transform our cities and our transport infrastructure to be safer, climate resilient, sustainable, equitable and liveable.
I believe that the highways and transportation profession is at the heart of this debate in that the choices we make today will have a profound impact on the world around us for generations to come. We have a responsibility to become the agents of change by harnessing the collective knowledge we have gathered over time to paint a vision of the future where our children and their descendants can benefit from the decisions we make today.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the CIHT or its members. Neither the CIHT nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.
