Derek Wall, director of business development, White Young Green

I was responsible for the construction of the High Bay Warehouse for Sandoz Chemicals (now known as Clariant). We elected to use concrete walls to divide compartments to give the warehouse stability in the event of a fire. This involved using a slip-form concrete technology, the first of this scale in the UK. This technique uses a moving shutter with concrete being poured continuously into the formwork – it took just over a week to rise 31m from the basement to the roof, and a month to build the walls of the entire warehouse.

This precaution was necessary because the warehouse would be used to store chemicals. The company had recently experienced a severe fire at a factory near Basel, Switzerland, in which 30 tonnes of toxic chemicals had been washed into the Rhine during the extinguishing process. The ecological disaster instigated new risk regulations – and since this warehouse was on the River Aire it was important that we put safeguards in place.

We built a 5.5m deep holding-basin in the basement so the chemicals could be contained and disposed of safely. The project was important ecologically, as a front-runner for how we deal with the containment of potentially hazardous chemicals and prevent water pollution from industrial incidents. It was also a challenging civil engineering project because we were using a new technology on an operational site within a very tight timescale.

Derek’s top tips

The person who is most interested in your career development is yourself. From day one, you should look to push both yourself and your employer to give you the maximum opportunities and a variety of experiences. There should always be another challenge in your career. It’s easy to stay within your comfort zone and there is a danger that you might do the same thing all the time because you become very good at it. However, it’s important to get a broader range of experience and to see the bigger picture – so you must take control of your career. A good employer should take the necessary steps to ensure that you are being rewarded sufficiently with appropriate experience. Civil engineers have the right skills to take on the broader aspects of project management and multidiscipline design, so it is important to ensure that you are given these opportunities.

Moving around and staying put

A career in civil or structural engineering brings opportunities to work overseas, but this doesn’t prevent you from having a reasonable family life. You can maintain a strong family unit by taking them with you when you travel – and still obtain the rewards that come from a demanding profession. But you don’t have to move around – either geographically or by changing organisations – to progress. By taking on new responsibilities in different divisions of the business, you will constantly find new challenges to keep you interested throughout your career.

Derek Wall, CEng FICE MIStructE, is director of business development at White Young Green. He has a BEng in civil and structural engineering from Bradford University (1971) and has 37 years’ experience.