Student story - Blago Mihaylov
Blago Mihaylov spent his industrial placement year with his sponsor company, BAE Systems, at Warton in Lancashire.
In my first year I was curious enough to go to one of the presentations organized by the companies supporting the course. I liked BAE Systems and applied for a summer placement after my first year. I was fortunate enough to get it and following my placement I even got sponsored for the rest of my studies. Unsurprisingly, I did my year in industry with them as well.
One great thing about doing a placement with BAE Systems and in particular within Military Air Solutions is that it gives you the flexibility of having up to three different placements during the year in industry. That variety gave me the chance to see a lot of different sides of the business and helped me to understand better how the company is structured and run. I was particularly pleased by the fact that Systems Engineering is well recognised and is proving to be a vital part of the company. Therefore, I managed to put into practice and further develop my ‘systems’ thinking.
A good example of that is my placement within the Airworthiness department. Nowadays, safety is extremely important part of engineering and I got a great insight into the subject, from redundancies and reliability to organisational issues and safety culture. I had to assess how a change of the operational environment would affect one of our products. And then roughly re-evaluate the overall loss model considering the changes in the existing hazards as well as any new once arising from the proposed modifications. I was surprised how often Systems thinking popped up in the Systems Safety context, not only in meetings, but also in some of the most current papers on the topic.
My last placement was in Support Engineering as part of the Core Engineering function. It is a capability that covers a wide range of activities but I was particularly involved in the integration part. BAE Systems doesn’t only offer products but a variety of services for those products. Designing a service has a lot of challenges due to the increase amount of human involvement within the system, the integration required and the difficulties related to verifying the system’s functionality and producing the safety case. The company recognises that systems approach is essential due to the complexity of the required solution and so the support engineering team is well aware of good systems practices. In addition, working in a team of mainly chiefs of disciplines I got familiar with engineering governance and witnessed a variety of good managerial styles.