VICKIE WILSON

When I was younger I was in the Air Cadets and at University I was in the University Officers Training Corps.  So I’ve always had an interest in the military and defence, so the defence industry was quite an obvious progression from that.  In terms of BAE Systems, I chose it because I wanted to work for a large company primarily because I believe it offers more development opportunities in terms of training, more opportunities in learning, working on big and larger scale projects that you might not get the opportunity to work on in a smaller company.

The Sigma scheme is similar to the graduate schemes, but it has an additional advantage in that its Head Office funded so you have the opportunity to move across all the different business units.  It’s been a brilliant thing to get onto because it’s really given me the opportunity to learn diverse range of domains, different parts of the life cycle from concept of a project right through to support and disposal.  So it's really given me the opportunity to broaden my experience of engineering, working with different disciplines and also working within different business units around the company.

Another key challenge of Sigma is you’re given quite challenging roles and expected to deliver against targets, and also there’s quite a lot of visibility from senior management so there’s quite a fair amount of pressure, which is a good thing because you learn from that experience.

In terms of the future I would like to continue working within BAE Systems, working on projects of increasing complexity and size and managing teams of larger size as well.