Meet Andrew - an insight into design engineering and overcoming challenging projects

My role and day to day responsibilities

I joined the Careys team about two and a half months ago. I’m a design engineer in Careys Design Team so my job on a day to day basis is to help the guys on site out by providing construction engineering designs which allow the job to progress in the most efficient way. This includes both temporary works (which will be removed before the project is completed) and analysis of the permanent structure in the temporary condition (when it’s only partially constructed).

What inspired me towards a career in engineering

My father is a carpenter so growing up I spent a lot of time around the building site and was always fascinated with how things get built. When I learnt more about engineering and found out that a career in engineering would allow me to be involved in the overall design and planning of large scale projects I was sold on the idea. Designing buildable structures has always been something that I’ve been interested in, so when the opportunity came up to move from a consultancy doing permanent works design into construction engineering I jumped on it.

Challenging and complex projects

Since joining the Group I’ve been involved in construction engineering for the Marble Arch Place Project as shown below, temporary works design for a demolition project in Oxford, providing technical assistance to the Work Winning team on a couple of bids and have starting working on reviewing some of our internal design standards.

At Marble Arch Place there were a number of challenges after we received late handover of sections of the site from another contractor. In order to help accelerate the rate at which we were able to start excavating the basement we undertook a series of detailed construction stage analysis of the site so that the construction methodology could be altered to suit the sections of the site that we had access to.

What I enjoy most and what our company culture means to me

I know it’s a cliché in engineering, but no two days are the same, every problem and every project is different so there’s so much variety in the work that I do. The opportunity to see stuff that I design being built soon after I’ve worked on it is very rewarding as well.

There’s always something that we can be doing better than how we're doing it now so we’re constantly striving to improve the way we do things to make the work we do easier, safer and more efficient.