Process Development Engineer Review

Day to Day, I work on the optimisation of current processes to reduce materials needed or time taken to produce the products. I also work on innovating new products and scaling up products from small lab scale to full factory scale ensuring their viability. Given I work in a global team, a large part of my job involves communication with teams around the world and sharing the knowledge learnt from work and experiments done in our pilot plant.

I started my job by learning more about hair care and processing using a site called degreed, which provided slides on each section of my required learning and then a quiz at the end to pass each section of your learning. A large part of my learning was shadowing batches taking place and creating my own shampoos and conditioners in practice batches. I had to be signed off on each of the rigs we had in our plant and this gave me a much more in depth understanding of the pipe and valves systems than I had previously had, as all my knowledge before had been theoretically learnt from University.

Yes, I have been given the possibility to design experiments based on problems we are seeing in our products around the world. The work I have done has been used to help teams around the world and has provided a lot of benefit. This is work I was trusted to do alone and in any manner I felt most effective. I have also worked with current technologies that we are trying to but on the market and my work has been pivotal in progressing these technologies

I received a lot of support from many of the people in my team on training. This training included the engineers training me on the equipment and showing me how to operate everything. It also included training on the apps and website that we use at Unilever and how to navigate each of these. I have also received support whenever I would ask on the work I have been doing throughout my time at this company.

I have really enjoyed working with my team, they are a very well mixed team and everyone of them are easy to work with and talk to. I always felt comfortable with asking members of my team any questions about work or the company in general. This also expanded to my managers and directors who were always more than helpful whenever I would need. Outside my team, there is not a huge amount of mixing that I experienced but whenever assistance was needed outside my own team that would always be easy to find.

I have very much enjoyed my placement, I have got on very well with my team and found it very good fun to chat and spend time with them both inside work and outside of work. I have also enjoyed the work I was doing and was always given the freedom to manage my workload, be that taking on more work or just focussing on one job at a time because there are always projects to get on with

Yes

I would them to prioritise getting to know your team first as these are the people that you rely on so much to get work done. I would also tell them to try to get to know other teams as there are so many great people at the company and there are so many people that you can become friends with. I would also advise people to explore opportunities for work outside your own team as this can lead to great opportunities and can be fun