We meet Philip Clayson BEng(Hons) MBA CEng FIET in the next of our 'My Engineering Career' blog series. Phil tells us about his career in the telecoms and broadcasting industry, the importance of personal networking and some of the large organisations and projects he's worked on...
Who I am, where I have been
I am Philip Clayson, a Chief Information and Technology Officer, (CIO & CTO) with a career across several interesting sectors,…TV, telecoms, emergency services and energy, with leading companies including News Corporation, Oracle, BT, TalkTalk, SSE and Sky
What caught my attention
As a child, I used to enjoy experimenting with electronic circuits, writing software, and authoring small games, I was inspired by creating and building with technology. I chose my GCSEs and A levels towards a technology-based career and studied electronics at degree level.
The benefit of an engineering degree is it teaches you to problem solve; you learn to unpack a challenge and apply logic and innovation to solve problems.
Tricky situations expected
One example of this problem-solving was in 2009. I was with BT, running its worldwide TV distribution network, touching 170 countries 24 hours a day in every one of those territories, all in different time zones. The task at BT was to build a new resilient TV platform for the London 2012 Olympic Games, ensuring that BT had a perfect, seamless operation during London 2012, distributing video to 170 countries for both the Olympic and Paralympic games; at that time, London 2012 was three years ahead. The current TV network had been in place for some years, had tech debt, and needed a complete redesign. This was a task with high reputational expectations because the UKTV market is one of the most advanced in the world, and London 2012 was one of the first major international events to be in HD, then a new technology.
The engineering task was to evaluate BT's entire worldwide network to increase reliability and assure security. We had to establish investment cases where necessary to replace, upgrade, improve, and add resilience, and security to that massive network. We spent a long time working out exactly what this could look like, how we would deal with potential issues and mitigate them in advance on a global 24x7 scale. There was a lot of technical creativity around how we would deal with time zones, how to deal with remote sites and how we deal with multiple events happening in the games at different times across the UK and in different places. Then there were the various connectivity types that we used back then - much of which was also satellite-based.
There was a great deal of creativity required to analyse what we were working with and then producing a solution, but the team I led at BT did a great job, and the London 2012 games was a technology success.
Tricky situations unexpected
Something altogether unplanned was the 2015 cyber-attack and data breach while I was working at TalkTalk. Once again, we were breaking new ground, and I picked up the work a few hours after we discovered the attack. No one in the UK, in any sector, had suffered such a cyber event before us. There had not been prior incidents for the industry, or TalkTalk to learn from. We were the first to have a cyber attack.
As such, using the skills engineers excel at (problem-solving) we were learning on a daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute basis how to deal with a large-scale, very public cyber-attack and data breach on an IT estate that wasn't the most secure. We were plugging technology gaps, changing processes, cleaning data, removing unnecessary IT technology - doing the very best we could to quickly tidy up the damage the attackers had done and ensure it didn't happen ever again. It took a huge amount of innovation, thought, creative thinking and (to a degree) experimentation to see what worked and what didn't. That led to some innovative solutions, some products and market development for other companies who then developed new technology using their learning at TalkTalk, technology that didn't exist before the cyber-attacks.
More arrows in the quiver
Over the past ten years, the technology sector has seen several mega-trends -first cyber (driven in no small part by TalkTalk), digital data and most recently, the explosion of AI. As part of my self-development, I am accelerating my ability and learning in AI, most recently with Oxford University Said Business School and their Artificial Intelligence programme. An understanding of AI is critical for my role. Studying with Oxford Said is a conscious attempt on my part to do a proper skills refresh, which I think, if I tried to do it in an ad-hoc style, would take too long. The subject is moving too fast for most people to be able to get to where they need to be in terms of capability and competence without a huge personal investment in time and effort.
This type of immersive learning has been a theme since I graduated. I was super-fortunate to have a very structured, respected, intellectually bright, and emotionally intelligent mentor in my first post-graduate role. Also a Chartered Engineer with the IET, and within a short time of starting to work for him, he said, ‘you should consider working your way towards Chartered Engineer.’ So, having been an associate IET member through university, I joined the Institution’s programme to become chartered, which I achieved in 1998 (four years after graduating and in the fastest possible time).
A few years later, another great manager supported me embarking on an MBA for three years part-time.
After about fifteen years of working, the IET approached me and said, ‘Have you ever considered putting yourself forward for recognition as an IET Fellow?’ The application took a lot of time, and to my delight, they awarded me a Fellowship at the end of the process, which was fantastic. I have been an IET Fellow for about fifteen years, over half my professional career. I have done various things for the IET as part of that relationship as a volunteer and technical network chair, including speaking at events, and travelling to represent the IET overseas.
Evolutionary change
My career has definitely evolved. I have transitioned in roles, companies and, to a degree, in the industry. I started in TV, in Research and Development with an organisation that was commercialising its satellite TV product rapidly. Ultimately, News Corporation (part of Rupert Murdoch's group of companies at the time) purchased the organisation.
This was for seven years, during which I did engineering software development, hardware development, manufacturing engineering and operational technology development.
Having amassed a good range of skills through this broad range of engineering activities, I was asked to be an architect. So, I joined the architecture team and helped to architect new platforms and systems.
I was also lucky enough to be asked to co-architect the Freeview network in the UK - another respected engineer and I designed it together one afternoon and it is broadly still as we designed it in the late 90s. Our Architecture has lasted, which is great!
Later, I joined a small team at Oracle, where we were a startup inside Oracle. We grew a business from nothing to substantial revenue in a year. Oracle's corporate team approached us to IPO that business, so we IPO’d it on NASDAQ and it did really well.
At Arqiva, who had just divested from NTL: Group, I led a failing 999/emergency services project and helped turn that around. After six years, I moved from Arqiva to BT and embarked on London 2012.
After TalkTalk, and the cyber recovery programme, SSE asked me to sell their Business-to-Consumer division to Ovo Energy; it was super experience. Then Sky rang me and said, ‘Would I come and help them build a competitor platform to Netflix within Sky.” I now working with Private Equity backed companies, developing fast investment technology plans.
Network, network, network
I think my personal network is really important; having lots of contacts with credible industry people, both those you have worked with and those you have met elsewhere, is really important. Maintaining a little bit of a brand for yourself is also important. You can do this via any number of ways including with links into the IET, to being active on LinkedIn, and speaking at conferences. But I think all those things together make for, and help you build an interesting career journey. It is not often easy for engineers to be ‘extrovert’ and build this network, but every tiny step helps.
As well as networking, I would encourage everybody to think about their career in ten-year waves. The early years, the following ten years, and the next ten years where you're really working your way up through. Then you start to stabilise a little bit into some senior roles for the next couple of decades.
In the same way as skills have changed rapidly (cyber, data, digital, AI, ...) the necessary soft skills have changed since I started (a greater focus on EI and EQ is needed to be successful). There is also more acceptance of people changing sectors, certainly changing companies, changing role types and even changing the way they are employed (full-time to fractional). The skills you need as an engineer these days are different to what people expected or thought of as acceptable 30 years ago. When I started, there was no talk of EQ or EI. There was very little talk on sustainability, we never really had to think about it, wasn't a thing, but these days all these elements play a factor in our daily engineering lives.
Who helped me
My first manager guided me through the Chartered Engineer accreditation process. He was more than a manager; he was a mentor - lovely guy, very humble, a very bright, respected individual. The next manager I worked for, this time deep skills in architecture, with a brain the size of a planet! - helped me understand if I wanted to have a longer, more fulfilled career I would need a business understanding, which for me led to an MBA.
Later, through a customer meeting during a digital transformation project I was working on, I met a man in an organisation we would later supply. His very pragmatic attitude to life I warmed to, and it led, a few years later, to him offering me a job, which I accepted. I learned a lot from him around how to manage in a big, complex organisation exposed to boards, exposed to shareholders, exposed to multiple things all happening at once. I learned so much. He left a couple of years later, but we kept in touch, and six years after that, I worked for him again, so he employed me twice. This is a really strong endorsement of how building a network is critical.
Bear these in mind
If you are an early-stage, early-career engineer, my suggestion would be - without becoming too annoying - try and say ‘yes’ to everything. Beware, I have had graduates do this;they 'spread themselves too thin and disappoint all over the place. Try, within some measured structured way, to say ‘yes’ to everything and get involved.
Another tip I have given in the last 12 months to recent graduates is: even though you will see a lot of experienced people doing hybrid working of various types, there's a ‘special’ learning by being in the office where you will suddenly hear something you had no expectation of hearing. You will learn from that in an ad-hoc, serendipitous style that you will not get in transactional, planned video calls.
Another key topic we recognise now more than ever is Mental Wellbeing. We, rightly, talk a lot more these days about this. Recognising when you are at the limit of your capacity, when you are stressed, and when you do not understand something, is a critical skill. Rather than sit in a corner not understanding or getting more worried, it is critical to ask because you will make a lot more progress with far less emotional stress. Make sure you're part of a physical community, not just a virtual one at work. If you are struggling, say so. We have all been in that situation; everyone needs some help at some point, no matter how experienced they are.
To my younger self…
The advice I would give to my younger self is to continue to do what I have learned to do, which is largely to say ‘yes’ to most things. Continue to network well. I was impatient. I have come to realise that you get noticed for what you do successfully, the quality, rather than the amount of noise you can make if you need to.
Take a bit more time, go a bit more carefully, be seen to finish things, and then move from there. Your trajectory will be just as fast, maybe quicker, but you will have picked up skills that will give you a career, and more likely have completed the task with good EI, and less stress.
Final thoughts...
Engineering is not what it was when I started. It is a whole lot better as a sector in terms of recognition, in terms of credibility, in terms of pay. Engineers never used to get paid very well. These days you can earn a lot of money, especially if you pick the right company and technology and you are good at what you do.
The issue of engineers being underpaid and underrecognised has mostly gone. I know what I pay my team; I know what the industry pays for good people. There are not many professions that can out-pay good engineers these days, especially if you are in the modern tech end of it (another good reason to keep yourself up to date!). I think it is a super rewarding place to be because you are problem solving on a daily basis, and that is why we are engineers. If that is your thing, there are going to be decades of problems to solve, whether it is AI or new technologies. There is no shortage of things to engineer that we do not yet know enough about. And, as a career, it is also so much more varied than it was in years gone by. I wish you all the best of luck with your technology journeys!
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