From Muddy Boots to Cleanroom Scrubs

Setting off in one direction

Since he was a child, Michael has always been interested in how things work, and any moving part of a toy would get dismantled and examined, sometimes to the frustration of his parents. But as he recalls, that curiosity was probably what led him to pursue a career in engineering.

Michael went on to study Civil & Environmental Engineering in University College Cork, and his first job out of college was as a CAD technician in a structural design consultancy. From there, he worked his way up to a senior structural design engineer before going into partnership in an Engineering Consultancy Practice in 2005.

“Working in this field presented many exciting challenges for a young engineer like myself, but the drawback was that it was predominately commercial developments where we would usually get out of the project early once the structure was completed and often never saw the final process in operation.”

Pivoting to pharma

Fast forward to 2008. For the generation Z among us, this was the year that the global financial system imploded, and the financial crash led to a collapse in the construction industry. Work had begun to dry up, and Michael found himself working for legal firms writing defects reports and appearing in court as an expert witness to get by.

“This kind of work felt a bit like throwing your comrades under the bus so I started to look for a change in direction”, Michael explains.

After considering a lot of options, he noticed that the pharmaceutical industry seemed to be the one sector that was constantly hiring engineers. Here, he came across a CQV (Commissioning, Qualification and Validation) training course which was sponsored by government and the pharma industry in order to help people with an engineering/technical background pivot into the pharmaceutical industry which was having difficulty finding suitable candidates. The deal was simple: Do your part-time college course, get setup with work experience and within a few months, you would be off on your next career adventure.

In 2012, Michael then started a career in CQV:

“I was in my late 30ies and back at the very bottom rung of the ladder of unpaid work experience, working on temperature mapping and requalification of autoclave loads. Once my work experience term was up, I was taken on as part of the CQV. Since then I have moved between a few large pharma companies in the West of Ireland, working on everything from temperature mapping of sterilisation cycles & freezers, traveling for Factory Acceptance Testing of new equipment, software testing, to process qualification of a new biologics filling line to product age defying products”.

“So now, I had found myself working on the opposite end of the project life cycle than where I started, long after the structural engineers had left the project”.

Development isn’t linear, and that’s a good thing

In 2022, Michael made the move to Dolmen Engineering which shortly afterwards became NIRAS Ireland. His first role within Dolmen was as CQV engineer on a new gene therapy facility. This was a new area for him, working mostly of utility/facility installations as most of my CQV experience was on equipment and process to date. As Dolmen were also appointed as process & piping designers for the clean utilities, and design coordinators for the gas detection system, this was a project that involved many departments within NIRAS Ireland. As the NIRAS Ire team and the project evolved, his role quickly developed into acting as the Project Manager for this project.

“This was a very steep learning curve going from managing your own time and tasks to managing others around you on tasks and areas which were often well outside my comfort zone.”

To explore this role further, Michael put himself forward for the Projects Director position within NIRAS Ireland in February of 2023.

The Projects Director role offered insight into all the background work that is necessary to keep the cogs of the company turning, proposals, resource management, client meetings, financials, communication with the wider NIRAS group etc. But the experience also left Michael with the clear feeling that this career track was probably not the right one for him to continue on:

“In hindsight, this may have been the ‘straw-that-broke-camels-back’. I found myself trying to cover both the close out of the PM task in the gene therapy facility, manage the growing validation department, managing numerous individuals each with their unique personal/profession priorities, and deal with the new responsibility of the Projects Director role. So in July 2023, I took the decision to step down and take some time off”.

“This is where I saw the unique and personal approach of NIRAS Ireland. The management team were very understanding and supportive of my decision, and we agreed to give it a month for the dust to settle and allow me time to clear my head. I had a few check-in calls with the management team over the month and in Sept 2023 I returned to NIRAS Ire back in my original CQV role.”

Looking back at the twist and turns of his career, Michael appreciates the more nuanced view that the experiences have given him. And when it comes to advising others on their career paths, he highlights that the most important thing is to not let yourself be driven by fear:

“Most people when they start on their professional career view the professional development path as an upward only trajectory and certainly that how I saw it when I first left college. But now that I can look back on almost 30 years of an engineering career, I realise that its not always so simple. Still, it’s my belief that one should never fear pushing themselves, taking on a challenge or changing direction in their career”.

“But you should also be prepared to step back if you realise that you are not suited to the position, and my own experience with pivoting to get a better result, even though that meant returning to my original area of work, has only given me a more nuanced view of life and work.”