From the Tools to the Drawing Board: Meet Joel Collins One of PSA’s Building Services Design Engineers based in the Cumbria office
We sat down with one of the team in our Cumbria office for a chat about how he got into engineering, what he enjoys about his work, and what he gets up to when he’s not designing electrical systems.
You started out as an electrician — how did that lead you into design engineering?
I left school at 16 and went straight into an electrician’s apprenticeship. I wanted something practical and I wanted to earn money, sixth form just wasn’t for me.
I ended up working on a lot of large healthcare projects, and that’s where things shifted. I started taking on more of a management role on site, which meant speaking directly to the consultant who was doing the design work. He was a real specialist, wrote books for the IET, helped develop the HTM regulations, that sort of thing. Turned out he’d also come up through the tools as an electrician, so suddenly it felt like a realistic path.
When a trainee position came up at PSA for Building Services in Carlisle, I went for it. That was eight years ago now.
What does a typical week look like for you?
It’s a real mixed bag, which is one of the things I enjoy most about it. Healthcare, education, council work, sports grounds, large private residences in the Lake District, offices, a bit of industrial and commercial, there’s not really anything we don’t touch. Most places across the county, we’ve had a hand in at some point, which is quite a nice feeling.
Is there a particular type of work you gravitate towards?
I try to keep across everything and know as much as I can, but I do enjoy the larger infrastructure projects, big mains work, secondary schools where you’re working out how to phase the supply and split up the scope. There’s a good mix of software, engineering and maths involved, but honestly, it’s the people side I enjoy just as much. Getting in front of a client, a contractor, an end user, you meet a real variety of people and that keeps things interesting. If we were doing just one type of work all the time, it would get dull pretty quickly.
What do you enjoy about working at PSA specifically?
In the Cumbria office there are six of us, and it just works well. There’s a good mix of ages and experience, everyone gets on, and there are no egos. We’re all just trying to do a good job and get things over the line. It’s the kind of team where everyone pulls together, and that makes a real difference day to day.
What’s a project that sticks out for you?
Two, actually. High Wray Bank was a challenging one, but I enjoyed it because it was so bespoke and large-scale, no off-the-shelf thinking, everything had to be worked through properly.
But Sandgate School was probably the most rewarding. It was all about working closely with the staff to understand what they actually needed, then tailoring the spaces to suit the pupils. Seeing it in use afterwards and knowing it’s made a real difference to the school, that’s what it’s about.
We’ve since picked up work at Kendal College on a new sixth form, working with the same staff again, and we also work at the primary school. So, you end up seeing the full journey of a school’s development, which is a great position to be in.
Sandgate SEN School
High Wray Bank – Luxury Residential
Bonus Question…What do you get up to outside of work?
I play the drums, have done since I was three. I’m at Grade eight and used to teach and play in bands, though not as much these days. I’ve got an electric kit at home so I can practice without the neighbours having too much of an opinion about it. And I’ve got a young family, so a lot of my time outside work revolves around that.
