Spirax Sarco’s graduate scheme, helping create and develop successful careers in engineering
People are at the core of our business, we know that we need the right people to maintain our
market leading position and work hard to ensure that we recruit them. These principles extend to
our graduate scheme.
We help our graduates to achieve their potential and realise their career goals. This is critical to our
success as a business and ensures graduates working for us are happy employees.
Ciara O’Sullivan, a graduate engineer, demonstrates how working for Spirax Sarco as a graduate has
made a difference not only to Spirax Sarco as a business but it has also given Ciara a good grounding
to move forward in her career as she explains:
‘During my business placement I was given a project to investigate a technology change in a
customer marketplace and look into the potential impact on the business.
Business Information Modelling (BIM) is the next generation of building modelling software. In
essence it is a streamlined way of connecting and organising every piece of information about a
building into the same project file. The software platform is constructed in a way that allows
designers, engineers, project planners, architects, specifiers and surveyors to work off the same
project file for the entirety of the design and build process. This is a new technology that impacts on
Spirax Sarco as a supplier to the construction industry with customers already starting to request
product files in a BIM format, something that will only continue to grow ahead of government
legislation which comes into effect in Jan 2016 for public sector projects.
I started off doing desk research and then moved on to face-to-face and phone interviews with
customers for direct market research. After gathering the evidence, I analysed the trends and looked
at the potential solutions and then presented these options to the senior management. My
recommendation was to run a pilot and use a vendor to create and host an initial set of BIM files.
This would provide the company with the ability to be quick to market and maximise on potential
commercial opportunities. Following the success of a small pilot and the continuing demand from
the marketplace, an initial products range in BIM format has been launched and published for our
customers as of September 2014 on BIMStore.co.uk.
This piece of work was an interesting project that has had a positive impact on the relationship
between Spirax Sarco and their customers. It provides customers that have migrated on to this new
platform product information in a new compatible format, making their jobs and work that bit
easier. As a first project, it was challenging but I was provided with lots of training, coaching, and
regular catch ups to ensure that I had enough support.
After my initial business placement, I spent 6 months in R&D as part of a team working on waste
heat energy recovery technologies, a project funded by the EU. Through this I had an opportunity to
lead a project update presentation to the EU’s technical team at their headquarters in Brussels.
Currently I am based in Malaysia where I have just started my international placement.
I have repeatedly found the working culture at Spirax is one where colleagues genuinely try to make
sure you are both part of the team and engaged in real projects for the business, and would
encourage anyone that is interested in both technology and business to put in an application. The
diversity of experience, real responsibility, international exposure, training and support all make this
scheme one of (if not the best) graduate scheme out there.