Management & Leadership
Apprentice to director, the long way.
I didn't learn management on a course. I learned it as a technician who became a senior engineer, then a laboratory manager, then a director — in labs where the schedule was always full, the customer was always waiting, and the equipment didn't care about either. This is the path, and the three lessons I'd pass on.
The path
Every rung, in order.
QinetiQ Aberporth
Engineering ApprenticeElectronic engineering apprenticeship on a live weapons proving range in West Wales, trained across radar, telemetry and mechanical departments. Everything since started here.
Powerlink
Specialist Electronic EngineerBoard-level fault-finding, repair and tuning of high-power RF amplifiers to deadlines. Where RF stopped being theory and became solder, bias points and a spectrum analyser.
Airbus Defence & Space
EMC EngineerEMC testing of satellite and ground station equipment; payload emission and susceptibility investigations on waveguide runs in Europe and India; and a year on night shift monitoring five thermal vacuum chambers — an education in patience and instrumentation.
Element Materials Technology
Technician → Engineer → Senior Engineer → Laboratory Operations ManagerEleven years in a commercial EMC, environmental and lightning lab, climbing every rung: daily UKAS-accredited testing to military, aerospace and commercial standards, then planning and team-building, then running the laboratory — people, safety, accreditation, customers and delivery.
Airbus Defence & Space
EMC Specialist EngineerConverting ten-plus years of hands-on campaigns into analysis, Python tooling and test programmes for the next generation of spacecraft payloads.
Mangata Networks
Director of Spacecraft TestLeading the design of a spacecraft build-and-test facility from a blank page — EMC chambers, antenna ranges, TVAC and vibration — and a small early-stage team spanning more disciplines than people.
Leonardo
Lead EMC Engineer (with a spell as Aerospace & Defence Business Manager at Eurofins E&E in 2025)Leading EMC laboratory operations and technical direction for next-generation radar and combat air programmes: expanding UKAS-accredited scope to DO-160G within twelve months, line-managing engineers, and building lab capability for what's coming next.
The short version
Lead the lab so the audit is boring, the queue is short, and nobody is irreplaceable — including you.
Three lessons
What the test floor taught me about leading.
Halving turnaround without buying anything big
At Element the lab was busy — good busy, the kind that pays the bills — but jobs queued behind jobs, and the queue was the product customers actually experienced. Over time we cut commercial test turnaround by around half. Not with a new chamber or a hiring spree, but with a stack of unglamorous changes that compounded.
Forecasting came first: looking honestly at what work was coming, instead of discovering it on arrival. Then cross-training, so a job never waited for the one person who could do it. 5S and layout — the right cable, adapter and fixture within reach of where it's used, because a lab loses hours a week to walking and searching. And tooling and software: templates, checklists and scripts that removed the repeated manual steps from setup and reporting.
None of those changes was impressive on its own. That's the point.
Throughput problems are almost never one big problem. They're twenty small ones — and the manager's job is to be the person boring enough to fix all twenty.
Small teams: direction without hovering
At Mangata I led a small early-stage team spread across EMC, antenna measurement, TVAC and mechanical test — more disciplines than people, designing a satellite facility from nothing. At Leonardo I line-manage engineers in a lab embedded in large defence programmes. Different worlds, same constraint: with a small team you cannot afford anyone working hard on the wrong thing, and you equally cannot afford to do their thinking for them.
What works is being extremely clear about what and why — the requirement, the deadline, what "done" looks like, what it feeds into — and then genuinely handing over the how. Engineers who own the how spot problems you wouldn't, and they grow. Engineers handed a method to execute stay exactly as capable as they were yesterday.
The other half is protecting the team from noise. In a startup that meant absorbing ambiguity so the engineers had something stable to build against. In a large organisation it means filtering the programme churn so the lab can actually run.
Define the destination precisely and the route loosely. Then spend your own time clearing the road, not gripping the wheel.
Accreditation as a tool, not a tax
I've managed UKAS/ISO accreditation in a commercial lab and, at Leonardo, expanded the accredited scope to include DO-160G within twelve months — plus the internal audits that keep it alive afterwards. It's fashionable for engineers to treat quality systems as paperwork imposed from above. I think that's exactly backwards.
An accredited lab is a lab that can prove its results: calibration traceable, methods controlled, uncertainty understood, evidence filed where it can be found in five years. Every one of those disciplines is something a good test engineer wants anyway — accreditation just stops them being optional on a bad week. And commercially, scope is capability: work you can't take accredited is often work you can't take at all.
The trick to audits, internal or external, is to run the lab so the audit is boring. If preparing for an audit takes weeks, the problem isn't the audit.
Quality systems don't slow good labs down. They stop bad weeks becoming bad results — the difference between "trust me" and "here's the evidence".
A working tool
The team skill coverage matrix.
The cross-training behind the turnaround story started as a grid on a whiteboard: people across the top, skills down the side, an honest mark in each cell. Any skill held by only one competent person is a queue waiting to happen — and a bad day away from a stopped lab. Build yours below: click a cell to cycle the levels. It saves in your browser.