Fire engineering as a career

Simon Lay from WSP offers a guide to fire engineering as a profession. He starts by explaing he became on ein the first place before discussing the challenges and opportunities the discipline offers.

An open discipline

I came to Fire Engineering almost by accident from outside the discipline. My route was Aeronautical Engineering, then the nuclear industry and finally fire engineering. This is one of the great things about the discipline: it brings in many people without a long list of academic qualifications and people from the public sector who may have little or no direct consultancy experience. It is perhaps one of the few engineering disciplines which recognises experience as equivalent to academic and research skills and openly embraces mature candidates, and there is also a very encouraging multi-cultural element to fire engineering.

A place to learn

One of the great things that the wide cross section of people within the fire engineering profession brings is that it is truly a place to learn. Even established fire engineers will admit that they are still learning new things. Learning in a fire engineering consultancy can come from academic routes, but it is a skill which is perhaps best learnt and developed through practical experience of a wide variety of project types and challenges.

Variety and challenges

I chose this career because of the unique challenges that it offers and the huge variety within the discipline. There’s a staggering range of projects that a fire engineering career can bring, from small office schemes, to some of the tallest and largest buildings on earth. Working within a multidiscipline consultancy brings opportunities to work on stadia, airports, ocean liners, secret government bunkers, nuclear power stations, Royal palaces, casinos, schools: pretty much any type of building you could think of. It’s often the most interesting and unique projects which require our skills. We sometimes have to remind ourselves that not everyone has the opportunity to work on and shape amazing signature projects such as the Millennium Dome, the Shard at London Bridge or the Mall of the Emirates.

A career with potential

Like most engineers new to the discipline, I started off working on a single aspect of larger projects before taking on more responsibility on smaller projects, then moving on to project managing large and complex schemes. Now I am a Director with business responsibilities beyond those of the fire engineering team.

There are a significant number of fire engineers who achieve Director or Partner status much sooner in their career than engineers from other disciplines perhaps because this discipline exposes engineers to the engineering design and building construction process in a very different way to other disciplines. There may only be a single fire engineer on a project, giving us plenty of contact with design teams and enabling us to establish relationships with clients. It also means that the fire engineer is responsible for managing their element of the project, including the financial and quality aspects.

Still an emerging discipline

Fire engineering is dynamic, and constantly evolving. The earliest fire engineering projects were primarily applied smoke, fire and structural engineering research, the combination of fire and risk engineering has lead to the introduction of complex probabilistic analyses into the discipline. Risk management in the form of value and lifecycle studies has become common.

Some of the most exciting projects make use of all of these skills and often offer the opportunity to work with a number of fire engineers, each with specialist skills. Some may have a PhD in fluid mechanics and others could bring skills from a career in the fire service.

Satisfaction guaranteed

As a fire engineer, my career has given me the opportunity to work with some of the best engineers and architects in the world. I have found myself constantly challenged by hugely diverse projects in over 30 countries.

Working as a fire engineer still gives me pleasure. Fire engineers have a different way of looking at problems, challenging the established wisdom, innovating and solving problems with complex analyses and common sense. Walking into a building and looking around, knowing that it exists in the way that it does because of fire engineering is thrilling. I sleep soundly at night because I enjoy demonstrating that safety is achieved in buildings. That might sound a little smug, but Fire Engineering can be a genuinely satisfying career.