A construction graduate has told of his experience of starting a new role in the sector on the very day Scotland went into lockdown.
Alex Clayton joined consulting engineers Dougall Baillie Associates (DBA) on Monday March 23.
As a brand new employee, he was ineligible to be furloughed. Instead, Alex was tasked with working at home. He explained, “I had enjoyed working for Mason Evans, a geo-environmental consultancy in Glasgow, for two-and-a-half years but thought I should extend my experience so when the chance to join DBA arose, I leapt at the opportunity.
“Moving to a new company is never easy; you are a stranger to its processes and ways of working, so getting to grips with doing things the DBA way was a challenge. Lots of my new work, based on computer aided design (CAD) programmes, was familiar; however, designing road layouts and drainage systems was not, but I was required, rapidly, to learn lots of new elements to the work.”
DBA director Scott Macphail added, “Alex hasn’t yet met any of his colleagues in person, although he has been working full-time for us since lockdown began, undertaking, initially, our formal induction and training courses online. We have welcomed him to our online Friday afternoon quiz, with banter and beer, over the past four months, so he’s not now an entirely mysterious figure. We are looking forward to introducing him face-to-face to all his colleagues when we all finally return to our office in East Kilbride.”
