Profile

I have lived in a lot of different places in the UK due to university and work! I’ll list a few off and you can see if I’ve lived in one of your cities! I’ve lived in Greater Manchester, Leeds, Hull, Sheffield, Burton-on-Trent and Stevenage. I have worked in even more, such as, Royston, Nottingham and now just outside Clitheroe. Living in so many different places has taught me lots and have met so many great people on my journey!

One of my big passions is badminton. I played in school and secondary school, but I was only okay (at best). I am a bit sad I didn’t try it at university, but while living in Sheffield I met 2 random strangers who invited me to play with them and it went from there. Next thing you know I was playing 3 times a week for hours. Sometimes you find something you love in the strangest places (so I advise you try something, even if you don’t think you’ll be good at it, no one started as a professional in anything).

I do photography as a hobby, I love having memories that I have captured and be proud of. It lets me tell a story in the way I want the story to be told and helps me think outside the box. I never was the person to want the same thing as anyone else, I always wanted to be unique, so I never want the same photo that everyone else has, which means sometimes I need to think outside the box with angles or the way I edit. Hopefully some of the pictures I have uploaded that you will be able to see should be good examples of that!

The part of the business I work in, is called catalyst manufacturing. We make catalyst for other chemical companies to use in their big reactors. Catalyst is a chemical (in my case we make all shapes and sizes of small pellets) which speeds up a reaction but doesn’t get involved in the reaction itself. This means you can reuse the catalyst for a very long time.

I look after certain plants which make specific catalysts. One of my responsibilities is investigating safety issues if something goes wrong or if something is raised. For example, if a pipe starts leaking water – I would go and check what time it happened, how long it was leaking for and how much water we lost initially. Then I would ask questions like, was it running correct to the process and I’d go find the data. Once I had all the data I would look at what caused it, (or likely caused it). You might ask “how do you know what caused it?” I have to string together the events, and all the experience I have and come up with a theory, sometimes I right first time and sometimes it takes more than one theory to find out what caused it. Once I found out the root cause it is also my job to come up with a way that it wont happen again. This is the creative side of the job I love. It can be as crazy or as simple as you want (we generally like to keep it simple because sometimes you may have more than 1 of these to do, other work that keeps you busy, and simple generally tends to come with less issues and money spending). But, doesn’t stop you from coming up with something out of the box!

Other things I look at, is process improvement. The company might be focusing on being more efficient or making more products to sell. Here, I might go around and look for all the things I think will slow the process down. This is what we call value stream mapping. Once we have found a piece of equipment, we can start looking at how to make it do more.

Is it as easy as just making it run faster? Usually not. An example for this might be, if someone asked you to run them a bath and it took you 20 mins to make one. They now might ask you to make you one that takes 10 mins. What would you do? You might first check, have I opened the handle of the tap fully? If not, you do, but it still might take you 16mins. In this example, you might need to look at getting a tap that lets more water out (so a bigger pipe and tap), or maybe you have a pump somewhere and it is not working as well, you might need to replace it or buy one that pushes more water through your tap. As an engineer, simple examples like this you can calculate and is it part of your role, but they can get really complicated really quick!

Some improvement come from the technicians, it could be something they do on a regular basis which is making their job harder, or not ergonomic (meaning it is not designed well for people to use it). This might mean I talk to other experts to see what they suggest or come up with, we trial and then make the permanent change.

I hope this helps in some of the things I get up to in my role.

I set my alarm for work at 5:30am. 8 out of 10 times, it wakes me up and I snooze till about 5:45 lol. But waking up this early is a choice, if I get into work for 7am I am able to leave at around 3pm.

Once I have listened to some bangers on the way to work, I get into the office after saying morning to at least like 6 people on the way to my office, I set my laptop up and plug my laptop into power and some screens I have set up on my desk.

I start by looking at my emails, messages from the previous time I was in. I may save some or action some for later. I will have a look at my calendar and see what I have got on in terms of meetings for the day. Once I’m done with that I will look at any safety issues or quality issues from the handover sheet we have. Our site runs 24/7 365, so the night shift may have left me a message or something to investigate.

I would generally get on with some quick stuff I can finish or reply to some emails between then and my first meeting. My first meeting is generally 8:30am and this is where we talk about priorities for the day / week, this gives me the chance to speak to technician and ask about any safety issues that came up in the handover to get a better picture as well as speak about longer term projects I might be doing.

At 9am, I will look at things that might need my immediate attention and support, so anything on plant which means putting my safety gear on and going to see the issue out on site with my own eyes. I would collect any data that I can’t get from my laptop, take some pictures and speak to technicians about the problem.

10am I would look at doing some immediate actions for the reactive problem at hand or work on some projects I have. Some of these projects I would put together what I am wanting from a project and I would speak to technicians and project manager to get them all on board. I will look at my to do list and just go down the list and find things I can tick off in my notebook.

12 is lunch, so get your grub on – I generally use this time to tease my work friends about how I will beat them in fantasy premier league or read the news as I eat.

I’m usually quite tired after lunch, so I generally go onto plant to do anything I need to do for my projects, these could be things like measuring equipment or looking at how much space we have for a new equipment etc. This stops me falling asleep at the very least!

The last part of the day I would work on any calculations / documentations / reports I may have or discuss projects with other colleagues working on the same thing. Some days I may be in meetings, some days not so much.

Just before I go home I will make a to do list that in my notebook on the things I plan to achieve tomorrow, I generally order them as the top 3 things I can do, and any little things I wish to do if I have time. This saves me from remembering all the things I needed to do the previous day in the morning.

It is a little difficult describing my day-to-day as it genuinely changes each day. I try keep structure to my day as much as possible, but sometimes you have to be open to adapting, or it can be really hard to adjust.