Hello, my name’s Mark Womersley and I am currently on my second year of the BAE Systems Graduate Development Framework (GDF).  I graduated from Loughborough University in 2005 with a MEng in Systems Engineering but have been employed by BAE Systems since 2002 as the company sponsored me during my degree.  The sponsorship meant I was able to work for the company during the summer holidays and complete a year in Industry, they also gave me a cash lump sum each year.

MAY 2009

Since the start of the year I have been working, still for Integrated System Technologies (Insyte), within the Unmanned Air Vehicle team. This is a very fast paced area of the business right at the forefront of the company strategy to grow BAE Systems' presence in the field of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles. At the beginning of the placement I was working on the HERTI Business Case programme which is looking to develop the HERTI UAV to a productionised standard to sell to any customer as an "off the shelf" system. In Insyte we are responsible for the Ground Control Infrastructure (GCI) whilst Military Air Solutions (MAS) are responsible for the overall UAV system. I was involved with testing the ground crew communications system and also the system that manages all of the mission data that comes from the Air Vehicle.

At the beginning of March I was moved to another project, still involved with the GCI for a HERTI aircraft but this time in developing a system in direct response to a requirement from the customer. This work was in a much shorter timescale and a much smaller team and as such I was the only Systems Engineer working on the program. My main objective for this project was to ensure that we had completed all of the work and documentation necessary for our System Design Authority to be able to sign off the GCI such that the system could be released to Military Air Solutions for flight trials with the real aircraft. My task was to capture the requirements for the system and document the design in discussion with the hardware and software engineers working on the project. I was also required to write, perform and document tests for each of the elements of the GCI that we were to deliver with this project.

At this moment in time we are coming to the end of the project and it is looking positive that the customer will be impressed by the system that Military Air Solutions has developed with our support. I am really enjoying the work I am doing at the moment as I get to see right across the engineering lifecycle from an system being conceived through design and test to the delivery of the system to the customer. There have been some long days with the time pressures involved but I feel that I have learned a lot about BAE Systems' engineering lifecycle and processes which will help me in any other project that I might work on.

OCTOBER 2009

As I start the second year of the Graduate Development Framework I am moving into a new placement within Integrated System Technologies in the National Security and Resilliance (NSR) domain.  This is a very new part of BAE Systems and a lot of the work being done is to try and win some new business for BAE Systems and I am now involved in developing some events designed to showcase our capabilities with National Security to some potential customers.  This placement is really challenging as it is very fast paced with tasks springing up as new opportunities arise.

The NSR domain use architecting and simulation events in a similar way to my previous placement but on much shorter timescales, projects can typically be two or three months rather than two or three years.  As I have some experience of the architecting and simulation techniques the team uses I have been given a lead Architect role for one of the projects which is really good at this stage of my career.  It gives me a chance to build on some of the things I had done in my previous placement whilst working outside of the Defence area.