Paul Haig is a Graduate Engineer at Westland and works across all the departments on the Yeovil site

I am an engineering graduate. I do a number of rotations around different engineering departments. My interest is aerodynamics so I’ve spent six months in the fuselage aerodynamics department which has been fascinating and I have also been in structural dynamics as well as structural design and development. The first few days are always a bit nerve-racking, they go and introduce you to what life could be like as an engineer. They show you all of the departments, you can go wherever you want and that, to be honest, was one of the main attractions for Westlands for me. It’s not a company, another engineering company, where maybe you’ll be working on a small component of an aircraft. You can work on anything from the first concept design of an aircraft all the way through the manufacturing process to the testing of the aircraft, flight testing and then even post-sales modifications to the aircraft and that was something that was very appealing to me because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I thought this is a company that I could explore, find out what my interests really are rather than sitting behind a desk every day thinking; this isn’t really what I like, this isn’t really what I want, and that is really the main attraction of Westlands. We do it all here on site and it’s only when you see a helicopter with its panels off that you can see all the little intricate designs, all the things that will have taken hours of thought and manufacturing to really make the entire thing happen and that is something you wouldn’t see with another company, with other large companies that have got sites all over the UK, all over Europe, that concentrate on one little thing. You’ll never see the entire thing altogether whereas here, we do it all here, we see it all here, you can interact with other departments, have your say, have your input and that is something I really, really like; a lot of communication to get the job done and make it successful.