Jack Chalkley joins The Engineer a Career Podcast to share what a career in construction actually looks like from the inside and how a project director gets built one project at a time.Jack is a Project Director and Scotland Healthcare Lead at AECOM, where he leads multidisciplinary delivery across some of the country's most complex social infrastructure projects. His route in wasn't planned, a builder sketching extension drawings on his parents' kitchen table sparked an interest in architecture, which became construction management at GCU, which became a trainee role at Clark Contracts running his own projects before he'd even graduated. Fifty projects later, he moved to AECOM and progressed from Project Manager to Project Director in under five years.In this episode, we explore what it really means to build a career in construction why placements change everything, how contracting sets you up for consultancy, and what it takes to lead client conversations when you're decades younger than the people in the room. We talk about the Golden Jubilee surgical centre and why healthcare projects keep him passionate, the mentors who shaped his progression, and why "be a sponge" is still his core advice years into the job. We also get into the contractor-to-consultancy shift, what good project management actually looks like, and why there's no single path through this industry.This is an honest conversation for students and early career engineers wondering what construction careers really involve and how far you can go when you stop worrying about your age and start owning the work.

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Josh sat down with Josh Murchie to talk through his journey into aerospace engineering and how he ended up working at GE Aerospace Caledonian in Prestwick.

What stands out about Josh's story is that it isn't a straight line. At 17, he made it to the final stage of the GE apprenticeship he'd dreamed of since doing work experience there as a school pupil and didn't get it.

From there, it became a process of pivoting, applying again, and finding a different route in: a foundation apprenticeship in aeronautical engineering, a first-class degree at the University of the West of Scotland, a Master's at the University of Glasgow (the same university that had rejected him for undergrad), and eventually a direct-entry role at GE Aerospace, without going through a graduate scheme.

This conversation challenges the idea that there is one route into engineering. Josh talks openly about the rejections that shaped his path, the imposter syndrome that came with each new step, and why he believes the most valuable thing his education gave him wasn't technical knowledge but the ability to think and problem solve.

They also explore what a New Product Introduction Engineer actually does, the value of bringing an academic perspective into a workplace built on apprenticeship trained expertise, and why Josh believes the next few years will be the heydays of aerospace and aviation.

If you've been rejected from an apprenticeship, didn't get the grades you wanted, or are questioning whether your route into engineering is the "right" one, this episode offers a different perspective on what a career in engineering can look like.

There's no wrong path.

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Alan Sinclair joins The Engineer a Career Podcast to share what it actually looks like to go from engineering student to graduate engineer — and what nobody really tells you about the journey in between.

Alan is a Graduate Design Engineer at Vital Energy, working in building services, and is five months into his first role after completing his mechanical engineering degree at UWS. His path wasn't straightforward — covid disrupted his plans, he chose Camp America over internships, and he had no idea building services was even an option until he was already in it.

In this episode, we explore what it means to find your feet in your first engineering role, why failing at things is actually how you learn, how sport built skills his degree couldn't, and what imposter syndrome feels like when you're fresh out of university and suddenly doing real work on real projects.

We also talk about chartership, hydrogen, and why seeing something you helped design get built never gets old.

This is an honest conversation for engineering students and graduates who are figuring out what comes next and wondering if they're ready for it.

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