My Year in Industry

Beginning with a week-long induction event filled with presentations, team-building exercises and plant visits the real stuff got going. I must tell that all my worries I had prior to staring my role in Pilot Operations were unnecessary. Since day one I was mentored by an undergraduate from the year before who got his placement extended from 12 to 15 months and spent those 3 extra months teaching me everything he learnt. And by everything I really mean everything, he introduced me to the main stakeholders I would have to do business with during my placement year and on the top of all the IT and HR tickets he helped me to raise to get my laptop, software licences, payroll and tax code sorted he guided me through all that software applications I would need to use for my role.

 
The only worry left after being handled as a new member of the family who needs help getting up to speed was whether I was good enough to keep up to speed with everything that was going on. Countless meetings I attended shadowing my mentor never really made much sense to me and most of the time I just spent leaning on a wall in 30+ people standing meeting trying to keep up with all the updates and key facts. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one getting lost as even my mentor, having done the job for over a year admitted some of the information, deadlines and inviolabilities weren’t entirely clear to him. 

As it turned out, the more I got involved and my hands dirty the more I understood all processes and meetings were starting to make more and more sense. The only way to get better and better was by getting more experience and so I went onto a voyage to get onto as many projects as possible and always kept moving forward taking on more and more challenging tasks that came my way. I must admit after 12 months spent as a valuable and equal member of the team all the meetings I took were a mandatory requirement to be able to not only do but also progress my work even though a year ago those meetings were only a bunch of what I thought was an unnecessary information from all different engineering teams and departments. 

Make no mistake, the more I learnt the more I realised how much there still is to learn (basically the more I learnt the more stupid I thought I was) and here I am, leaving Jaguar Land Rover having spent a great year with wonderful people working on great products and motivated more then ever.