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Case study: Financial crisis led to a change of engineering direction

Every graduate dreads losing a dream job offer, but when this happened to Marek as the result of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, he pivoted and embraced a new engineering opportunity.

Marek completed an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in renewable energy integration, which kickstarted a ‘new’ career. He is now a founding member of a rapidly growing technology company and advises the UN on energy storage

Mini CV

  • 2005 to 2009: Civil engineering, Durham University
  • 2009 to 2013: EngD in technologies for sustainable built environments while working as a research engineer, The AES Corporation
  • 2013 to 2014: Renewable energy consultant, Electricity Association of Ireland
  • 2013 to 2016: Business strategy consultant, then customer solutions and commercial projects manager at The AES Corporation
  • 2016 to 2017: Market director, AES Energy Storage
  • 2018 to 2020: Market director, Fluence
  • 2019 to present: Energy storage expert, United Nations
  • 2021 to present: Managing director, Fluence

How the ELS helped...

A kickstart: “Having the award on my CV in the early days helped me get the opportunities I got. It helped my application to get into the doctorate and then the roles after that.”

Deep knowledge: “The trips and things I did helped round my knowledge.” Marek thought the best way to increase the use of renewable energy was by working inside a large fossil fuel energy company and changing it from the inside. He gained an understanding of the pros and cons of different types of energy generation at AES, except for nuclear. “But I’d seen that through the ELS programme so I could talk and argue either side of the fence for CCS and nuclear, for example. Having the ability to see all of those and debate all of them is helpful, because it gives you a lot of credibility” he says

Gearing up for big things

Marek decided to specialise in civil engineering: “I wanted to work for a Buro Happold or an Arup, and then potentially launch my own consultancy further down the line and do it for myself,” he says. He applied for the ELS programme hoping to meet
similarly motivated engineers from different disciplines.

In 2009, he organised a trip to Japan to explore his interests, including a trip to see Hitachi’s robotics work and a nuclear power station where he donned a radiation suit and went into the reactor chamber. Marek also visited a sustainable housing community near Mount Fuji. “The Japan trip was one of the biggest and most unusual things I got to do as part of the scholarship, which otherwise I wouldn’t have done,” he says.

A big change

Marek was sponsored at university by the Happold Trust and did summer placements at Buro Happold. He had a job offer, but lost it before he started in the height of the 2009 recession. “This is when I pivoted and my
career took me in a different direction,” he says. Marek decided to do a doctorate in renewable energy integration, looking at the challenges of renewable variability on grids. “I got an attractive salary and got to do
PhD level research – working on a problem that really mattered – in industry,” he says.

Afterwards, he worked at a power station near Belfast, slowly moving into designing large-scale energy storage systems to help link to the grid, and before leading the development of Europe’s first commercial battery engineering project, which involved developing the project, raising investment, getting approval and seeing it built.

“Having the award on my CV in the early days helped me get the opportunities I got.”

A career in the fast lane

It hadn’t occurred to Chetan to apply for jobs abroad before he spoke to his ELS peers. Out of three job offers, he chose Volvo Car’s graduate programme in Sweden. “I was born in Hong Kong, my parents are Indian and I grew up in the north east of England,” he says. “I was a bit of a chameleon fitting in everywhere and nowhere, but at Volvo, I was around other people like me.” Chetan worked in the design studio like he planned. “My first day in the studio was the first day of the design of a brand-new car … so I got to live my dream of seeing a car go from a clean sheet of paper to the final design.”

Then, Volvo launched Polestar – an electric performance car brand – and Chetan’s career shifted up another gear when he was asked to become the CEO’s assistant. “As a 27-yearold, I was freaked out,” he says. “My childhood dream was to design a car and here I was being presented with the opportunity to design a car company.”

Advice

He says the funding is helpful for doing something you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. “Think as big as you can and find a way to be able to justify it,” he advises. “Being able to blend something that’s memorable, fun and useful to my development was one of the key benefits of the ELS programme.”

“Don’t underestimate the benefits of knowing other people going through the same exams and experiences,” Marek says. He believes the network he gained from the ELS programme is invaluable, but he made good friends as well as contacts in different places “which is useful from a business perspective”

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