About the Author
Andrea Tanner currently works as an Engineering Programme manager helping the Bristol based Nimble storage development teams deliver quality features into the Nimble product line in a timely manner.
She is a charter engineer having graduated from Swansea University with an BEng in Electrical, Electronic Engineering.
In her spare time, she is a Girl Guide leader and head referee for the UK&I First Lego League Robotics competition. She has a husband, Richard, and two daughters following in the STEM tradition currently studying Maths and Physics at university.
When I joined HPE (then HP) in 1996, I never dreamt I would still be here 25 years later. But at the beginning of June, I will achieve that milestone.
The expectation when I joined was that single company careers were a thing of the past and you could expect to change job and employer every 3 to 5 years. I’m pleased to share that this prediction was only partially correct. I have indeed changed role around every 3 to 5 years, but all within the same organisation and, in fact, all in the Bristol office.
I didn’t take the traditional A levels to university route into technology, leaving school at 16 to spend 7 very happy years with a small technology company that made control equipment. Whilst working in the test department, I attended college day release to obtain my HNC in Electrical, Electronic Engineering, where I was the only girl on the course. However, with nowhere left to go in the company I enrolled at a university to get my BEng in Electrical, electronic engineering. On graduation, because I had been so happy working at a small company previously, I chose to take a position as a HW developer for another small organisation. Unfortunately, I spent the next 22 months feeling lost and out of my depth with no one to learn from. With my confidence through the floor, some careers advice from a rep at the IET (then the IEE) encouraged me to apply for a position as a HW engineer at HPE Bristol (then HP) and I’ve never looked back.
Suddenly I was in a supportive environment with an abundance of varied role models, endless encouragement and lots challenges. My first role was debugging failures from the tape drive production line. I was soon combining hands on HW skills identifying manufacturing and soldering defects with analysis of test results in the production line database. This led to learning how to script in Unix shell alongside SQL for interrogating the database in order to write automated debug procedures so that we could disposition failures with little or no human interaction.
Soon I was involved with moving the production lines out of the UK to the Philippines and Hungary, ultimately doing myself out of a job.
However, the skills I had learned were transferable and set me up well for a change in direction and a move into RnD as a Product Reliability Engineer, where I could help to develop the next generation of tape drives.
Then around 5 years later there was an exciting new project on the HP Bristol site developing disk based backup and they needed a Quality Engineer. The challenge here was adjusting my focus from HW to SW. Could I apply my previous experience in this new area? Sure. Of course I could, and I did. While I didn’t become a SW engineer, the next phase of my journey taught me about the different development processes and how to achieve high quality SW. In fact, I often think that not being able to write the SW helps me identify issues and opportunities which SW engineers may miss.
But 25 years is a long time, so there are another couple of twists before we reach the present.
After all this time, I’m now working as an expert engineer where I have a certain amount of freedom and luxury to choose what I work on. With this in mind, my focus turned externally to finding better ways to monitor customer quality, identify and prioritise issues, and influence RnD to fix the most important ones. This was a very satisfying experience as I could directly observer the difference my work had made on customers. I was then asked to help provide Engineering Programme Management back in the RnD organisation where I have been for just over a year. I suspect I’ve got another couple here before the next exciting opportunity presents itself.
My main motivation throughout this time is to be doing something interesting and challenging. I’ve never had a clear view of where I wanted to go in my career which has allowed me the freedom to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Whenever I’ve recognised that it’s time to do something new, something has inevitably presented itself, occasionally with a little searching. While I may have worked for one company for the 25 years, both myself and HPE have evolved and grown in that time to ensure my time has been varied and often exciting.
Maninder Randhawa
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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Maninder_R
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Early Careers Lead - UKIMESA