Learning from others is an important way to advance your career, at Wood we have a strong network of technical experts and leaders who are invested in the career development of our people.
Josh Coombes has found that his relationships with mentors across the business has helped him shape and grow his career. Josh is a project manager based in Perth, Australia, he started his career journey at Wood 10 years ago and is keen to give back by being instrumental in helping to shape our inspired culture.
Background
I began life at Wood as a subsea engineer, then moving into subsea integrity management – quite far removed from an Aerospace Engineering degree out of university. In 2016, I was lucky enough to be accepted for the accelerated business management programme, that Wood was running at the time. The programme aimed to place people into a completely different part of the business, expose them to new experiences and help improve their leadership and management skills.
My placement resulted in a move to the automation and control group, working just outside of London on the TCO Future Growth Project for over five years (although another useful measure of this duration was ending up with two kids that I didn’t have at the start!). This is when project management became my primary discipline.
I know everyone says this about Wood, but it is genuinely true, what I enjoy most about work is the people I work with. I like face-to-face interaction and learning from others’ knowledge and experiences, whether this is clients, peers, other stakeholders. I also enjoy the delivery focus that I have in my role, as a project manager I love delivering tangible results for our clients, making sure I have planned and prepared everything and watching this play out is very satisfying.
Current Work
Currently, I am working on an exciting project for a major mining company in Western Australia. Wood is conducting a production network hardware refresh a mine in the Pilbara region, this network refresh is critical to enabling the client’s continued operations, reducing the risk of unexpected network failures interrupting production.
This project is interesting as it aligns perfectly with our digitalisation strategy. It is also in a new industry for me, so there’s been a steep learning curve.
For me, Wood’s mission to design the future means harnessing technology and our ability to model, simulate and leverage data from our clients to drive better outcomes for them. We have the capability to help our clients and the broader community by using technology to provide better outcomes towards a more sustainable world and future.
Mentoring
I have a few mentors in Wood, this developed off the back of my time on the business management programme which was a great opportunity to network with senior leaders within the business and I began having conversations with them to get some guidance. Now, I have a mentor that I speak to monthly, it’s a great opportunity to speak about problems, provide feedback and work things through.
I have picked up some skills and best practices from my mentors on how to work and help coach people on my projects. Now, I also have a mentee based in Canada who I offer guidance to, it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to give back in this way, as well as learn from their thoughts and experiences.
If there’s one key takeaway from this blog, it’s to reach-out to someone you respect and believe you can learn from and look to setup a formal or informal mentoring relationship as it’s a great help professionally and personally.
Shadow Leadership Team & Career Plan
The Consulting business unit at Wood has a Shadow Leadership Team which was created to give employees a platform to have a direct impact on our strategy, and to work with the Consulting leadership team to shape our inspired culture at Wood.
I applied to join the team because I am passionate about our culture at Wood. Having been fortunate enough to work globally I was struck by the differences in office social interaction and team cohesiveness between offices even before the work pattern changes due to COVID. Getting involved in office life is an important part of work for me and I wanted to see if I could help drive this across the business by being part of the Shadow Leadership Team.
Career Plan
In terms of my career plan, within five years I would like to see myself in a position where I am shaping and growing a service line within the business. Longer term I would like to move up into the senior leadership team within Wood and help shape things into my vision of where the business can go. Defining and documenting a five-year plan for my career has been incredibly useful as it’s helped me to clearly articulate and get buy-in to actively progress my career, if you haven’t done this already I would highly encourage it..
Outside of Wood
Outside of work, I have two young children, aged one and three who keep me very busy. Otherwise, I like to keep active and am an avid gym goer and very part-time triathlete. With my remaining time you’ll find me on my flight simulator - I used to have a pilot’s licence and fly when I was younger, this digital version is how I get to still scratch that itch!
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