PHILLIP GARRETT

At BAE Systems there are three general categories: air, sea and land.  Within those business groups there are different business units so you get things like Military Air Solutions, Submarine Solutions, Global Combat Systems and my new unit, called INSYTE.  It stands for Integrated System Technologies and we basically feed into each of those three major groups, air, sea and land and we integrate systems on a variety of platforms.

As a software engineer, I would be fixing bugs in the software so someone from testing will give me an observation that they’ve seen about the system, for instance, if they press a certain button – the system crashes.  My job is then to look inside the code and find out why it’s doing that and then try and propose a fix so that when I give it back to the test department, for the second time and they test it, it then works as predicted.

After I graduated from my Masters, I had a two year gap where I was self employed developing my own mobile phone games.  I knew the technologies that I was working with very well but when I looked at the application form for BAE Systems, I wasn’t too sure about some of the technologies that the individual projects were using.  However, when I arrived at BAE Systems they identified knowledge gaps that I had and sent me away on training courses.

Within BAE Systems INSYTE, the graduate scheme is divided into six monthly placements so you have four placements over two years.  I’m currently in software but I could be in project management in my next role, or I could be in commercial, or I could be in sales and marketing, or I could be in systems engineering.  The variety within BAE Systems is definitely a good thing to have on a graduate scheme where you get to move around each different project and you get experienced people on that project to inspire you and to help you out.