INDUSTRY COMMENT
In an age when employees in all industries expect to change
companies several mes during their careers, it is unusual to find someone who has spent half a century with the same firm. But Roy Gould has done just that, having reached the milestone in an extraordinary career as a senior design engineer with leading mechanical and electrical building services specialist J S Wright
ould has been designing mechanical services for the UK’s hotel, residential,
social housing, student accommodation, leisure and commercial sectors for the past 50 years. Still working four days a week at the age of 66, he insists he has no plans to call it a day. “I thoroughly enjoy what I do because there is plenty of variety and every day brings a fresh challenge,” says Gould, who celebrated his achievement with colleagues over a buffet and drinks at Saint Pauls House, a bar- restaurant in Birmingham a few miles from J S Wright’s Aston head office. Thanks in no small part to Gould’s efforts, J S Wright has been expanding rapidly after opening new offices in London and Bristol and a new prefabrications unit in Birmingham. Business is such that the company is looking forward to becoming a £60 million business within the next two years.
Fiveyear apprenceship
Gould joined the 128-year-old company in 1968 at the age of 16 on a five-year apprenticeship when it was still a family run business: “I actually went there for a job as a pipe fitter, but instead I got offered a design engineering apprenticeship,” he says.
“The MD asked me if I could print
my name and decided that was good enough to take me on. They had around six apprentices at the time – enough, he told me, to make up a works football team.” Gould qualified as a design engineer in 1973 after completing his City & Guilds on block release at a local technical college and was promoted to senior design engineer ten years later.
He has used his skills on new build and refurbishment projects for organisations ranging from the likes of Quartermaster-Stores and RAF Cosford to Next Generation health clubs and Accor hotels. More recently he designed the plant rooms for the Mint Hotel Tower of London and Keybridge, a luxury high-rise scheme in Vauxhall incorporating the tallest brick residential building in the UK. He is currently engaged in the fit-out of the 645-home Nine Elms Point development in Wandsworth.
Key member of sta
J S Wright’s managing director, Marcus Aniol, says: “Roy is an outstanding design engineer. When it comes to plant room layouts, he is without doubt the best designer we have ever had.
“I hope that Roy extends his exceptional length of service with us for another ten years, and in the meantime continues to pass on
his vast experience to our younger people.”
A key member of a directly employed workforce that has grown more than ten times to the 175 staff of today, Gould can look back professionally and personally on a revolution in the use of technology. “When I started at J S Wright, all work was done by hand. I would sit in front of a drawing board and do my designs and make calculations with nothing more than a pencil and paper,” he says. “Laptop computers and smartphones were the stuff of science fiction.”
While he applauds the benefits of technology, Gould also believes firmly in the need to understand the basics: “Some new apprentices arrive thinking that calculating a pipe size is simply a matter of feeding some figures into a machine.
“If you haven’t done calculations by hand, then you won’t know if you’ve entered a wrong figure. Keeping a grasp on the basics is a real help in double checking, particularly when you are working with CAD.”
Bright future
Gould has no doubts that apprentices have a bright future in the industry, especially in companies like his where great emphasis is placed on instilling
BSEE
Senior design engineer celebrates 50 years of service G
uRoy Gould, senior design engineer
company values and nurturing personal and career development. “Apprentices nowadays go through our own training academy and follow an in-house experience course which helps prepare them for senior management. They even have their own mentors and the opportunity to gain a degree,” says Gould
“You can see the benefits every day in the skills, motivation and confidence that our young people consistently demonstrate, and the industry awards they win. “A record 35 per cent of our staff are either current or former apprentices, represented at all levels of the business. That shows it’s a good time to be an apprentice.”
www.jswright.co.uK
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BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER JANUARY 2019 27
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