Product Safety Engineer Review

As a product safety engineer, your main role is to identify any hazards or safety concerns within a project and come up with appropriate mitigations and ways of managing each hazard. Usually this would involve using techniques such as FMEA and fault trees to examine a project/system and see what possible things could go wrong, the likelihood of that happening, what the consequences may be, and how this can be dealt with.

During my placement, I had a lot of time creating FMEA and fault trees on projects, which gave me a greater understanding and developed those skills that I had originally done at University. Working with experienced engineers on real projects gave me a good idea of how the theory is applied in real life. I have also developed skills using computer programmes to represent system models and how to incorporate safety using those programmes.

As the placement progressed, I started to get given more responsibility as I became more involved and comfortable working within my project to the point of presenting to senior engineers and hosting meetings to carry out work. The workload increased appropriately to how I was developing so was not overwhelming and gradually improved my development within the business.

I received a lot of support throughout my whole placement - from my placement manager, line manager, mentor and team manager. I stayed in regular contact with everyone I worked with and everyone was always available and willing to help if I had any questions to ask. There was always someone to talk to and if they didn't know an answer, they would guide me to someone that did.

The culture within every team I worked with was very supportive. Everyone was given appropriate levels of responsibility and worked strongly as a team to help each other out whenever it was needed. There is a very friendly atmosphere between everyone and plenty of opportunities to socialise and meet new people both professionally and casually.

I really enjoyed my placement because it helped me develop a wider range of skills both technically and the soft skills. The nature of the placement allowed me to push myself to develop whilst still enjoying the work and not getting overwhelmed. The friendly and supportive culture of the business allowed me to gain confidence in what I was doing and also get helpful feedback on ways to improve.

Yes

The biggest piece of advice I would say is to have an open mind of what you want to do and take advantage of the opportunities you are given, which is a lot while on placement. There are so many opportunities to work within different teams, on new projects and to meet new people. So being open to experience different things will definitely work for you while on the placement.