In this inspiring episode of Amplified: The Engineers Journal Podcast, aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Stephen Ringler, Managing Director of Space Store, shares his journey from working on NASA’s Juno mission to launching a space-themed retail and education company in the UK. Host Dusty Rhodes delves into Stephen's early fascination with space, his experiences navigating large-scale engineering projects, and the challenges of budget cuts in the space sector.

Stephen also explores the power of inclusive space education, revealing how Space Store aims to make space accessible and exciting for everyone — from schoolchildren to corporate teams. Packed with insights on testing, risk management, active listening, and keeping passion alive in a demanding industry, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in engineering, innovation, and the future of space exploration.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
●    Space belongs to everyone - not just scientists and engineers.
●    Testing is critical: break it until it stops breaking.
●    Communication and collaboration are essential in large-scale engineering projects.
●    Active listening leads to better engineering outcomes and more relevant solutions.
●    Drive and passion need support - from self-talk to strong mentors.
●    How space innovation directly benefits life on Earth - from MRIs to climate tech.

GUEST DETAILS
Stephen has over 20 years of experience working in the Space sector as a Pointing Precision Engineer, Programmatic Analyst, and Business Developer. With his training that began at UCLA and his vast experience and network in the Space community, his aim with Spacetime Development is to provide top-notch business development support and engineering services to high-tech companies. Stephen enjoys exploring castles and playing board games, jazz piano and drums. 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/   
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
•    "Break it until it stops breaking, and then we can send it to space."
•    "The space industry belongs to everyone."
•    "We bring space to Earth - that’s what we do."
•    "Sometimes we solve problems that people don't have."
•    "If you're ultimately trying to take human beings and put them somewhere else, everything that is part of a human being needs to be thought about taking them somewhere else."
•    "If I lost either engineering or teaching, I think I would die a little on the inside."

KEYWORDS
#SpaceEngineering #STEMEducation #AerospaceInnovation #EngineeringLeadership #SpaceForEveryone #TestBreakFix #FutureOfSpace #InspiringEngineers

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:01
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to Amplified, The Engineers Journal podcast. 

Stephen Ringler  00:04
The space industry belongs to everyone. If we're ultimately trying to take human beings and put them somewhere else, everything that is part of the human being needs to be thought about taking them somewhere else. And I have to make that point that it's for everyone. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:12
What happens when a rocket engineer has a Build A Bear epiphany on a date night? We're about to find out with today's guest. It's an engineer with years of experience in aerospace engineering, working on everything from NASA's Juno mission to wrestling with the ultimate challenge, how do you make space accessible to everyone? And here's the kicker, he has actually cracked it. He's created space store, the world's first space themed retail concept, built using a team that includes NASA astronauts. Loads and loads of interesting conversations about problem solving as we chat with our guest today. It's a big welcome to Stephen Ringler, how are you? 

Stephen Ringler  00:56
Very good. Thanks so much for having me dusty. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:59
You're welcome. Listen, I have to start off and ask you, how did you I normally ask people, How did you get into engineering, but you're different. How did you get into space engineering? 

Stephen Ringler  01:08
Yeah, it's funny. There's really two reasons. The first reason is, there's a show called Star Trek The Next Generation. And I tell people, when I grow up, I'd like to still be captain Jean Luc Picard, and I'm getting close. I'm getting close. I've got the you've got the receding hairline there, yeah, got the hairline going. That would be a dream to meet him. And then secondly, my grandfather worked on the Apollo missions, and I thought that was super cool. So I was like, I gotta learn more about this.

Dusty Rhodes  01:36
Wow. So did you? Was your grandfather, like, able to share much about what he did on the Apollo missions. How was he involved?

Stephen Ringler  01:43
So what I have picked up is he worked on the logistics side. So there's quite a lot of logistics of transporting different products, etc. So that that was the side he worked on. And I believe the company, the company he worked for, was ultimately bought by Boeing. 

Dusty Rhodes  02:00
Ah, very good. So basically, you started off with life. You had the interest in engineering. You wanted to solve problems. It was in your blood with your grandfather, yeah, and you're a natural Trekkie. There you go. You had no You had no choice. 

Stephen Ringler  02:12
And you know, my parents bought me a really nice telescope when I was young, too, and that just was fascinating. I Yeah, so I was sold

Dusty Rhodes  02:21
You were done, never looking back. So listen, tell me that some of the stuff that you were actually involved in, because you're well known for being involved in NASA's Juno mission and its ultraviolet spectrograph instrument. What was your engineering role in that project? Yeah.

Stephen Ringler  02:35
So it was a really cool role. So I worked as what's called an inheritance analyst. So the ultraviolet spectrograph is an instrument that had flown on previous missions. And one of the things we do with NASA is when we're bringing on a previously flown instrument and looking at it on a new mission, we need to analyse how much heritage comes from the previous instrument, how much is new, and how's that going to affect the system? So I was brought on board to look at past instruments, the current instrument, and basically say, Yeah, this is this is good to go. So that was my role.

Dusty Rhodes  03:13
So did you have to come up with ideas for let me just double check, was this the actual same physical instrument, or were you looking at kind of version one, and you then had to go and create a version two? 

Stephen Ringler  03:27
Yeah, great, great question. So versions of instruments, like, if you ask any, anyone that works in the industry, engineers, they're never happy with what they have. They always want to make it better and better and better. And so I think this was version three or four of an instrument, and it had quite a few upgrades. And it specifically had upgrades on certain motorized parts that I had expertise in. So there's something called a stepper motor, which is a certain kind of motor that I was able to help with the analysis of and ensure that it was doing what it needed to do.

Dusty Rhodes  04:02
Okay, cool. What about NASA? Because, I mean, it's a huge organisation. I'm guessing there's a million people working for NASA or something like that. It's a lot. It's a lot, all right? And the problem with organisations like that is that they are just full of different agencies and sections and fiefdoms and little kingdoms and everybody you know, and you're trying to work across all these people and be nice to everybody, but yet some of them are really getting in your way. How do you let me ask you, what were the key challenges in that kind of like collaboration, working with a lot of different agencies, and as well as the challenges, how did you overcome them?

Stephen Ringler  04:44
Great question. So I think you're right. So if you think of any bureaucracy, any large organisation, you're going to have what we call stove piping, so people working in kind of very specific sections, and you have. To learn to work across the stove pipes to make anything work. So let's just take Juno, for example. The mission probably had somewhere around 1000 2000 people that worked on it at some point. So communication is gonna be key. And that's everywhere from the highest level setting the objectives, the science missions, all the way down to the instrumentation level where I worked, which is setting what instruments are going to go into space. So you have to just learn to be friends with everybody that you meet. So a very important piece of advice for engineers is really, always be kind like always try to make friends with everybody that you're working with, because you never know when you're going to have to work with them, and it turns out, you're going to be meeting lots of strangers on these projects, people that you haven't worked with before in order to make it progress. Because one kind of interesting fact about space missions, especially ones that go out to the outer planets, is we have very specific launch windows that we fly. So if we don't make that launch window, if we don't hit that date, we don't send the mission, or we have to wait another year or two. So hitting that deadline is very important.

Dusty Rhodes  06:05
That's a hell of a deadline. You don't normally get that that tight? Why? Why is the deadline that specific?

Stephen Ringler  06:12
It really comes down to the alignment of the planets, quite frankly. So it's where the planets are at any given time, because we use something called gravity assists to help us get a spacecraft out to the outer planets as well as to the inner planets. What that means is that a satellite, as it approaches another object, it could be Mars, it could be Earth, it could be it could be any object that we have in space, and we will fly around that object and be able to slingshot around it to get some extra speed. So that's the reason that we have to have them aligned correctly.

Dusty Rhodes  06:46
Okay, so essentially, what you're doing, you are engineering a project that is aiming for a moving target.

Stephen Ringler  06:51
Yes, everything's moving in space.

Dusty Rhodes  06:55
Wow. I'm trying to come up with an engineering equivalent of that, and all I can think of is, like you're trying to build something on a barge on a river that's moving and you need to finish it before you reach the bridge. Okay, okay, I'm not an engineer. Engineer. I always tell people, I'm a sound engineer. That seems to cover it. That's that's my excuse for getting in here.

Stephen Ringler  07:15
Sound engineering is great, too. I do that as well, and we look at frequency plots all the time on spacecraft, just like we do in sound engineering. 

Dusty Rhodes  07:23
Well, listen, tell me a little bit about this, actually, because I want to go back to the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument. I mean, what is it? Sounds exotic, but what is an ultraviolet spectrograph instrument? What does it do? And how does it work? 

Stephen Ringler  07:36
Great, great question. So there's something called the electromagnetic spectrum, which is effectively where all light passes through. And you and I and all the listeners are very familiar with a very, very small section of that spectrum, and it's called the visible spectrum, and that's what our eyes can see. Okay, that's everywhere, from the colour red all the way up to the colour blue, and everything in between. But that's just a very small section of it. It actually goes way beyond that. You've heard of radio waves, which might be how some broadcasts going. Then you've also got microwaves, what we use to heat up our food. And then you can get even into ultraviolet light. And ultraviolet light we cannot see, but we know about some of the effects right? Ultraviolet light is one of the things we try to protect ourselves from, the sun or sun sunscreen, and also, we made an instrument that can look at that specific light, and in that specific light, we're able to detect things that we couldn't see with our eyes or with the optical so That's why we have different instruments that run in ultraviolet, infrared, microwave. There's all, all sorts of different instruments.

Dusty Rhodes  08:48
So occasionally, when we see something on the news about a new galaxy has been discovered, a new star system, or something like this, or new pictures have come in from the satellites that are orbiting Earth. I mean, they look amazing. I mean, the colour is huge, and it just it looks like a piece of art. But better is that the kind of thing that has been captured by the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument.

Stephen Ringler  09:13
Ah. So the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument works in a very different way than the telescopes that you see. So the telescopes that we see like take James Webb Space Telescope, which is the new kind of biggest and brightest and awesomest telescope in space that works in the infrared, so it's a different light that we don't see. And when you get those images, it's taken just like a camera picture that we would take on our phone. So it comes in as like a square, okay, but then we can't actually see any of that light, so we have to do what's called false colouring of the information that comes in to turn it into something that you and I can see.

Dusty Rhodes  09:51
So then, if that was looking after infrared, then the ultraviolet side of things, what do you discover with your instrument?

Stephen Ringler  09:58
So the ultraviolet, um. Sensor is a scanning sensor, so it actually looks at it's a little hard to explain, but basically, instead of looking at like a square picture, it even though the focal plane is still a square, it's actually only looking at a very small slit, and then all the rest of the pixels have to do with different wavelengths in ultraviolet. So it's doing a scan of Jupiter as it goes around, and the primary thing it's looking at is what's called the Northern Lights of Jupiter. So the Northern Lights of Jupiter are just like what we have here on Earth, except they're three times the size of planet Earth. They're gigantic. And the reason that's interesting to scientists is because Jupiter has one of the biggest, strongest magnetospheres in our solar system, apart from earth, and the magnetosphere here on Earth is what protects you and I from ultraviolet rays coming in and hurting us. So it's another it's effectively a big magnet, and we're studying that with the ultraviolet spectrograph.

Dusty Rhodes  11:04
Cool. Now, before I know that, because I love all of this, I'm just a space and an aviation kind of a guy coming back to kind of a engineering aspect of that. What's the biggest professional challenge you faced?

Stephen Ringler  11:17
Okay, I'll tell you what I think the biggest professional challenge I faced. It really comes down to being sold a dream when I was a kid about we're going to send humans to Mars. We're going to go to these ice planets around Jupiter. And then when I got into the industry, and I worked for NASA, watching the budget GET CUT and CUT and CUT and CUT was incredibly painstaking, and so much so that, and I've heard it's gotten cut even more that I actually decided to up and leave where I had dreamt of working forever and to try a different model, which is here in the UK, where they do things a bit more commercially. Now, no model's perfect, whether you use kind of the government funded model, if you use a more commercial model, but that that was a really big challenge for me to see, that you have to start doing more or the same with less and less money. And that actually became to a point of diminishing return, and we're still not on Mars with humans.

Dusty Rhodes  12:21
So for you, then the solution was, right? I'm not putting up with this anymore. I am a person. I have got my own dreams and things that I want to achieve, and I've got my heart in this to a certain extent. If it's not going to work here, I'm going to make it work somewhere else. And I think what you've done is literally jumped out of the pan and into the fire, because it's one thing having a professional challenge in a big organisation, but you decided to go out and then do it on your own, on a completely different thing, and share your passion and enthusiasm for, you know, engineering and space and everything the world, by uh, setting up a space store. So tell me, tell me kind of where, because you've a great story to go with this. All right, you went from NASA to build a bear, or another way. You went from Build A Bear to starting a space store, and you did all this on a date night. Of all things, are you crazy?

Stephen Ringler  13:16
Of all things with, with my lovely wife, who we are still very happily married. No, I mean, it's I personally find looking back on it, because this was about 11 years ago when I moved from NASA to the UK, and they in the UK, they brought me on board to help set up, or not set up, but expand their space community here at a place called Harwell campus, which is a Science and Technology campus that hosts what we call the space cluster. So when I came there was like 20 ish space companies. Now there's like 100 there's quite a few people working in space. But I came over with the feeling of, you know what, I'm a little lost. To be quite honest. I had this dream to work in this one place. I did that. I loved it, but I got disappointed, so I was trying to find myself, and within the first three months, we had to go back to America for a work trip, and we were on a date, we were walking through a shopping centre, and we saw Build A Bear, and I was just like, Huh, what if we had build a rocket. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't there be kids like me who maybe, know, not into stuffed animals, but more into rockets? Wouldn't that be rad? And that's where it just snowballed so. And what's funny is, I've never actually created the build a rocket part of the company, yet. I would like to someday, but it just snowballed into this thing about, well, okay, there is still people. There's young people that have the same dreams that I had when I was a kid. But how do we how do we bring that to them, and how do we bring it to them, also realistically, so they understand what they're getting into so it's not to say, stop the dream. I think we should still send people to Mars. I think that's a great dream. We should do. It, but how are we going to do it? What are the what are the obstacles? What are the challenges, like funding that gets in the way and working cross globally? How do we, how do we make these things work? And so that's that's kind of where that passion all got directed to, for space door.

Dusty Rhodes  15:14
So you're kind of thinking of kids who, like you said, you little bit of space in your blood with your your grandfather, you like watching their space shows on on TV, and you wanted to reach and just touch it and try it out and see if there's some See, this is kind of the core mission of space store, where kids, teenagers can come in and they can touch it and experience and kind of get an idea of it. How do you do this? Because, you know, you're still on earth, to give them a sense of space.

Stephen Ringler  15:43
Well, we bring space to Earth, that's what we do, and experiences is what people are looking for. When we started the company, I asked two questions to a whole bunch of people. The first question was, do you like space? Yes or no, and would you pay for an experience of space on Earth, yes or no. And it turned out that 96% of people said yes, they like space. 92% said they'd pay for an experience of space on Earth. So I thought, well, that's a pretty good market to go for. That's almost everybody. But of course, we had to pick and choose different categories to kind of start with, and the journey has really led us to doing a huge focus on the education side. So working with young people between the ages of 15 all the way up to 22 but then also you'll be, I'm sure you know, you said you're a big space enthusiast. There's a lot of adults out there that love this too. So we actually work with corporations, and we go in and provide kind of edutainment. And I think of one of my jobs in life is to try to convert people from whatever industry they're working in to come over to the space industry, even as adults.

Dusty Rhodes  16:51
So let me ask you, Steven, what actual activities then do you offer at space? Or give me examples?

Stephen Ringler  16:57
Well, we do all sorts of activities to get people interested in space. And one thing to I know we're going to talk about engineering, but I must make this point, and that is that the space industry belongs to everyone. So if you think about it, if we're ultimately trying to take human beings and put them somewhere else, everything that is part of a human being needs to be thought about taking them somewhere else. So that means we need to think about food, clothing and fashion. We need to look at architecture, we need to look at design. We need to be able to tell stories creative writing. We need to be able to tell history. So I'm mentioning subjects here that aren't engineering and math, and I have to make that point, that it's for everyone, and so that is one of the core drivers for us, is that we have activities that cover the gamut. Because, as I mentioned, 96 people, percent of people like space. Why would we want to close off our industry so that only the small five to 10% that might pursue engineering, and that's one of the problems that I discovered when I worked back at NASA. And it's not a problem of NASA, per se. It's a kind of a global problem we have in our industry that we focus so much on. You have to study math and science if you want to do this, and then we've really pigeon pigeonholed ourselves, and now a lot of people just feel very distant from the space industry. They don't know what we're doing. I remember when, and you might remember this too, when the Space Shuttle Program was retired under President Obama, I had so many people ask me, oh, so the space the space program is over, like the space program is not over. You still use Sat Nav to get to where you're going. You still use credit card machines that go through satellites, you know, like, What are you talking about? And we as an industry have had a problem of being able to keep the public engaged in what we're doing. So I want to make that point that it's not just for science and engineers, but we do activities across the whole bit

Dusty Rhodes  19:02
it's come but it's that's kind of like, you know, in engineering is like, you know, scientists and engineers build buildings, and then the other 90% of the population don't give a darn How was built, all right, but they use it. So it's the same thing in space. So what you're doing is, you're kind of showing the 90% hey, here's the kind of things that you'll be able to do, but we still need the 10% of engineers in order to kind of figure out the problems. Figure out the problems and put

Stephen Ringler  19:24
it together. And truthfully, we need more than 10% and that's part of why my my goal, and part of why I love engineers Ireland, because you guys are doing this too. You are trying to inspire more people to join the industry for that exact reason. So I do like secretly, not secretly. I want people to get into stems or steam science, technology, engineering, arts and math. I want them to do that, and we do activities along that way as well. I think one that's one that's really fun is we've partnered with another organisation here in Oxford called House of fun, and they have been doing an engineering activity Workshop. At schools using a very cool type of Lego kit. It's a Lego kit that, effectively, I know, wait for it can build over 200 different models. And when I, when I found out what they were doing and how they were doing it, I, like, I leaped on it, and have now become very involved with them to bring the engineering aspect to schools, and we've started engineering clubs, engineering workshops, where I can actually teach kids at the young age of five, six all the way up to secondary school, the engineering process. Because, get this, I mean, I'm at schools. Literally every day. I've been I think yesterday, I was at two or three schools, and last week, I think I went to seven different schools, and I have the same conversations with students, and I say, you know, I teach them about engineering roles, what's a procurement engineer, what's a mechanical engineer, what's a quality assurance engineer. They have no clue about what these rules are, but I can teach them the role and then have them do the role while they're building something around Lego and then I can teach the engineering design life cycle, from requirements to building it to testing it all the way around. And that's one of the activities that I've been super passionate about over the last few months. Since we've we've started this partnership to really get that engineering piece in there as well. So that's one example. I've got many more examples I can tell

Dusty Rhodes  21:23
you about. Well, let me ask you a specific question. Then, I'm an engineer. I'm based in Ireland, going to the UK, either for a trip myself, or perhaps a quick holiday or a weekend away with it, with family. And I kind of think, hmm, maybe I'll get the kids to come along, or maybe I want to see this myself, all right, to inspire that little, ah, career in engineering could be good. Do you have a specific experience that you offer at Space store that will be good in that specific circumstance? Yes,

Stephen Ringler  21:50
yes, we do. It's called astronaut experience for two, but you can do it for four, you can do it for six, and you can come to our shop in Oxford, at the heart of Oxford, at the covered market, and we basically provide you an hour and a half experience that's very hands on, that will hopefully inspire not just young people, but also trying to convert adults to work in our industry. And that activity, that experience includes using augmented reality, which is a type of engineering that we've had to use to create augmented reality. So we have the solar system, we have different rockets, et cetera, that we can use to kind of get those juices flowing. We use virtual reality. So we have a number of different activities that they can they go in and they go into space, and they see what it's like to be in space, and they see what it's like to launch on a rocket. We then take them on a kind of scientific discovery journey using meteorites. So we take actual rocks from space and kind of tell them the story of how we got them here on Earth and what's so special about them. We also have replica space suits. So we actually have suits that aren't the real thing, which are really expensive, and they're not costumes which are really cheap, but they're they're somewhere in between that give a really realistic experience of, hey, this is what a space suits like, and these are the engineering pieces of the spacesuit to keep that astronaut alive. And then we also do a little fun thing about food and how space food works, because a lot of people have misconceptions about how how food works in space, and so we teach them about that. And of course, you get a nice little cool astronaut certificate as you leave. So that's that's probably the best thing. If you're visiting, come to the shop, spend an hour and a half with us. It's good fun. And hopefully, if you're looking to get inspire your kids, it'll do that for you.

Dusty Rhodes  23:35
Cool. If you're planning a trip to the UK spacestore.com.co.com, is the website or just search space story? You get it. Let me move on to problem solving and teams. Did you work with the Aerospace Corporation? Am I right?

Stephen Ringler  23:49
I did, yes. All right, yeah, nearly 14 years I think, wow. And what did you do there? Yeah, so I am what's called a precision pointing engineer. Whoa. It's a fancy way of saying. We like to take things in space and make sure they point in the right direction. Perfect example, if anybody has, you know, TV from you know, satellite TV, there's a satellite above your country. You want to make sure it's pointing at you. That's what we do.

Dusty Rhodes  24:16
Cool. Tell me what were the most critical lessons that you learned while you were there about project management.

Stephen Ringler  24:23
So okay, on project management. I mean, I think this goes across technical and project management is testing, testing, testing. So when it comes to putting something in space, you can't go fix it. So the rigor that's required to test and make sure something works on the ground before we send it up is incredibly important, because if it gets up there and something breaks, that's it. You're done. You've just wasted hundreds of millions of pounds or more. So I think a lot of people don't appreciate that in the engineering design. Cycle that after you build something. So you design it, you build it, and then you test it to be very comfortable with when you test it, it to not work, and then to go back and circle around the design and build part that is just going to happen. And a lot of people kind of think, Oh, well, if you have a really good design, it's just, you build it, it's just gonna work. Yeah, that is just not the case in engineering, in any form of engineering, but in space, especially because we have no means to fix it, or virtually no means to fix it. So that would be number one lesson is make time for the testing. Really plan your testing out until that time.

Dusty Rhodes  25:37
And do you also make it a point of try to break it. I mean, go out of your way to try and break it? 

Stephen Ringler  25:43
I go out of my Yeah, that's funny. You say that. I tell people that my middle name is, I'm going to break it. And that's on purpose, like, because I'm a test engineer as well. And actually, on some recent projects, I've been training up some young test engineers, and I tell them their job is you need to break it. Break it until it stops breaking, and then we can set it to space.

Dusty Rhodes  26:07
Okay, well, then let me ask you. Then following on from that, because one of the Okay, I'm gonna say in inverted commas, exciting things about space engineering is that things go wrong and frequently, and things blow up and, you know, talk about breaking things. Goes wrong. How do you approach risk management? Because that's such an important part of engineering, how do you approach risk management and mitigation for these engineering technologies,

Stephen Ringler  26:34
risk management and risk mitigation is like the top of the list, especially for space programs, but you have to categorize risk based off of the objective of your mission. So what do I mean by that? So for NASA, there are four different classes of missions. There's a, b, c and d, simply put a James Webb telescope, no tolerance for risk. That thing has to work. We're going to put all the money we can possibly into it. That's why it cost over 10 billion pounds or $10 billion Excuse me. Class D is more on the research side. We're going to we're going to accept risk. We're going to see what the risks are and say, You know what, I'm going to live with that even though it might go wrong, because we're going to spend less money. So at the start of pretty much any engineering meeting that you're running, whether you're on a Class A to Class D mission, you start with the risks you have, what's called a risk register. You you've identified. These are the key things, and how are we taking those risks from week to week and making sure that we're conscious of them, we're trying to mitigate them, or we're going to accept them. So that's, it's, it's, frankly, it's the start of every meeting.

Dusty Rhodes  27:43
Wow. And you can apply that, of course, to every engineering tech project across course, is just a good philosophy. Another thing I want to ask you about was, I mean, you're a very good public speaker, and listening to you chatting here is evident. I'm thinking of engineers where you've got a project and you've got particular technical things behind it, and you want to make it work, all right, but then you hit that wall where you have to make a presentation, all right, and you're talking to people who are not technical, or they're stakeholders, and they're more interested in the money, and you're trying to communicate this complex technical information to them as because you need them to sign off on or say, yeah, what's your way of dealing? Because you've dealt with some really mad stuff, all right, but yet, you need to get funding for it. So how? What's it? What? What tip? One or two tips you would have for presentations, for engineers, to convince

Stephen Ringler  28:36
people, I've got a few, I've got a few tips. The first tip is that people are people. At the end of the day, all humans eat, all humans sleep, all humans have hobbies. So think about every human you meet as like they're actually probably not that different than me. They probably are interested in something. They probably like something to eat, and they probably live somewhere. So if you kind of bring your guard down to the point of like, Hey, we are all in this together, and we're humans, I think that that's one kind of block that helps. Because I think when I first started, I got this impression, and don't get me wrong, you do need to respect those that are that have gone before you. You need to have a deference. I think that's very important, especially for for young engineers to really think about, you know, how do I respect the the folks that have gone before me, but also remember that they're people, and they've gone through the same path that you're going through. So that that's, that's kind of tip number one, it's kind of that mind, mind change about who you're working with. Tip number two is, if you can get involved, even at your own company or with some of your friends, any sort of kind of like weekly or fortnightly practice, how to practice talking technical or talking to different people. We do that at the company, one of the companies I work at, and I can see a huge difference in some of the folks. Yeah. Yeah, tip number three is talk to a mirror. And this sounds weird, but I think one of the problems that we struggle with internally is that we struggle to be okay with who we are. You've probably heard this before. Suddenly you're on a microphone and you hear your voice, and it's higher than the voice that you hear in your head, and that immediately puts people off, and they think, Oh, do I sound like that? And I might you need to become okay with who you are and how you sound, and I found the best way to do that is, if I'm gonna give a talk or I'm gonna give a speech, is I stand in front of a mirror, I'll look myself in the eye, and I'll give myself that talk. And you can learn a lot from that process. So those are three tips. I've got more, but yes, I think it's very important to practice those skills.

Dusty Rhodes  30:46
I also want to ask you about kind of engineering skills, because from what I've read about you, it appears to me that you've got kind of three key engineering skills. All right. One of them is passion, all right, which a top skill for anybody. But do you think that turning passion into career can be a bit of a killer, like I was always into radio broadcasting, and then I got into and I loved it for a long time, and then eventually, kind of, how do you keep that passion alive and then use that passion to motivate teams

Stephen Ringler  31:19
that that's, that's, I think, fundamental to, again, us being human beings. If you are doing what you love, it doesn't feel like work, and you put your heart and soul into it. Now, I have had similar experiences that you've just mentioned around, okay, but I really like this maybe hobby, or I like this thing, and I don't want it to die because it becomes work. Yeah, so there's that kind of balance. And I think what's important, and I found to work for me, is, you know, is to learn about myself, of where does my Where does my day to day passion lie, where I can every single day, know that I'm going to enjoy what I'm doing and test that. In fact, before I even started space store, I tested it for like, a couple years. I wanted to see, will I keep working in evenings to make sure this is, you know, what I want to do for the next 10 years, because that's what you have to give when you start a company. But then I also have other passions and other things that I enjoy, like fish tanks, role playing, games, computer games, jazz piano. These are all things I like and I enjoy. I could probably do some of those things for a job, but I keep those as things that I'm like, Ah, I can. I can spend a little bit of time with that here and there. And I think that help for me is what helps balance it. But one last thing I'll say is that I discovered this in my 40s is I didn't appreciate and that, you know, you're a product of your parents a lot of times. And both of my parents were teachers, and I didn't appreciate that inside of me was the desire to teach. And now I have found that 50% of my time I spend doing engineering, and 50% of my time I effectively do outreach or teaching. And people ask me, Well, Which part do you like more? And I'm like, Well, honestly, if I lost either of those, I think I would die a little on the inside. So I need both of those things to kind of keep me going.

Dusty Rhodes  33:13
It's funny when you share your passion with other people, their interest then drives your passion again. It just keeps the fire going. It's great. Another key skill that I think you would agree with is listening, and especially active listening. Are you able to share an example of where active listening kind of improved an engineering outcome for you?

Stephen Ringler  33:35
Yes. So active listening, I can't emphasize this enough. One of the pitfalls of engineering is engineers love to solve problems, which is great. That's why we're engineers. We solve problems, but sometimes we solve problems that people don't have. And we'll just go down that path, and we will try to make this amazing thing, whatever that might be, and then we make it, and we show it to people, and they're like, Oh, well, so what? Like, I don't want that, right? And that's where active listening comes in. So there are, there are two kinds of ways that you can do research and develop products. One is called push, one is called pull, and in my experience, 95% of everything we do is what's called pull. That means that I need to talk to the customer. I need to talk to the person that's ultimately going to pay this from before I even draw anything on the board about what's your problem, what's your pain point, what are the things that are driving you crazy and keeping you up at night, and then focusing on that throughout the entire engineering life cycle. So an example that worked really well this last year, I've been leading both from a project and the technical side of project called stridor, which you can learn more about. We've got a little bit on the BBC you can see, and it's a robot that is. Designed to help clean up bad stuff, so things like chemical, biological or radiological incidents, and it helps kind of clean those things up so humans don't get in the loop. And one of the reasons I think this project has been so successful over the last year is that we got the operators, the biologists, the chemists, the people that wear the bunny suits that have to go in and use swabs and sweat to, you know, high heavens and all the we got them at the very beginning and said, tell us what your problems are, but not just them. We every month, we would bring them in and say, Are we getting it right? Are we doing the right thing? And I think that is why we've had an incredibly successful project that's continuing on. So that would be my two cents

Dusty Rhodes  35:42
on that. The third key engineering skill that I wanted to ask you about was drive. And specifically, we all have bad days and we all have setbacks. How do you maintain drive with yourself and your team?

Stephen Ringler  35:57
That is, that is probably one of the hardest parts. And I think another word that folks might use is something called Grit. Maybe I don't know who would use that in Ireland or not, but this idea of, how do you make it through when you're having a bad day? And there's a lot of different skills, a lot of different things you can do, one that I found has been very helpful for me, is something called positive self talk. So this is a technique that falls into something called cognitive behavioural therapy, and that's where you can't really change your feelings, but you can change your thoughts. And by changing your thoughts, you can help, you can help get through tough feelings, and so being able to self encourage yourself is one of those things. I think another thing is, is to keep your eye on the prize. So if you think about, I mean, take space store, for example. You know, 10 years ago, it was an idea at a shopping centre with my wife, like walking by Build A Bear. Then it eventually became something on paper. Well now, now we actually have a shop. Now I actually have a business that that's been profitable for the last year. It's actually working. And if I had given up three, four years ago during covid, when I had to put all of my life savings into the company to keep it going. I basically we had to do everything we could. It was at that time. It was at that hard part where you had to really have that, that inner fortitude and that drive, and remember the prize is still there. Keep fighting for it. And also, I mean, the third thing I'll say is you got to surround yourself with people who have gone before you. So I am very keen on mentorship. I have mentored multiple mentors. They can be they can be older, they can be younger. It doesn't really matter. It's people that maybe have done what I would like to do, or what I'm trying to do, or maybe are doing the same thing at the same time, and keeping those people around you to just say, No, keep fighting, keep doing it. It's worth it, that those are the things that I think really have helped me with. Drive.

Dusty Rhodes  38:06
I usually like to end a chat with asking, you know, where do you see yourself in five years time? It's the ultimate question everybody hates, right? But you're, you're a wee bit different, Steven. Can I ask you, where do you see the major long term benefits of space engineering for humanity as a whole over, say, the next 20 years, or even up to 2050

Stephen Ringler  38:31
I love that question, because I think that's one of the things that should continue to drive us to go to Mars, to go To the moon, to put people in space, because the technological benefits that we humanity have received from space is just mind blowing. And again, this is another part of the puzzle that we as an industry have struggled with, is helping people understand what they're benefiting from because of that. I mean, take the MRI for example, right? The MRI exists because of space. Our modern day refrigerator takes place because of space. Our modern day computer chip takes place because we develop something called state space, which is now used in every computer. So there's all these things that we just really wouldn't have done had we not gone to space. And so I think over the next 20 years, personally, we should be investing more in space exploration, because it's going to continue to provide more benefit for here, us, here on Earth. And take climate change, for example. Climate change is real, whether it's human made or not. It doesn't matter. The climate is changing, and we as humans need to adapt. So we need to think about what are ways that we can make those adaptations, because harsh living conditions already say, living in the desert or living in, you know, on the equator is just going to get harsher. So if we're trying to live in an even more harsh environment, like on the Moon or Mars, all. That technology is completely applicable to us here on Earth. So that is what I would think. Over the next 20 years, we should invest more in space globally. I think every country should do more. And yeah, I think it's going to

Dusty Rhodes  40:16
benefit us. Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of, you know, spending 5% on NATO or your defence budget, or whatever you were to also spend another 5% on exactly that.

Stephen Ringler  40:28
Oh, my goodness, I can imagine. Can you imagine? I mean, it would be, it would be mind blowing. Now I, you know, since I've got the platform, I'm going to go ahead and say something that I believe pretty strongly in. I think that, I think you're right. I also work in defence, and I appreciate defence. It's an important thing. I have no problem with it. But to your point, I think there are ways that we could vector money towards things like education and research that are going to help make this place, make our world a better and more peaceful place that will benefit us in the long run. So absolutely agree with you on that.

Dusty Rhodes  41:06
If you'd like to find out more about Stephen and some of the topics that we chatted about today, you'll find notes and links in the description area of this podcast, including to Stephen's website, which is spacestore.co, but for now, Stephen Ringler, a managing director. Oh, hang on. What is it, Steven-  I blow things up for fun – Ringler! Stephen Ringler, Managing Director of Space Store, thank you so much for joining us. 

Stephen Ringler  42:03
Thank you so much 

Dusty Rhodes  42:07
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. Our podcast is produced by Dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advanced episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineers ireland.ie for now until next time, from myself Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.
 

Engineering has always been about solving problems—but today’s problems are bigger, greener, and more complex than ever before. From cutting carbon in concrete to tunnelling under major cities, the pressure is on to build infrastructure that’s not just strong, but sustainable.

In this episode, we explore what it really takes to deliver major engineering projects while meeting ambitious climate targets. We’ll hear how to lead under pressure, manage high-stakes decisions, and unlock career-defining opportunities through mentorship and curiosity. Plus, we look at how engineers can drive innovation from within—by asking the right questions, building strong teams, and embracing failure as a pathway to growth.

Our guest Ross Cullen, Group Chief Engineer and Head of Engineering Services at Sisk, brings over 20 years of hands-on experience across some of the UK and Ireland’s biggest civil infrastructure projects, including Crossrail, the Limerick Tunnel, and the Luas Cross City. He’s passionate about decarbonising construction and shaping the next generation of engineering leaders. 

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
●    The importance of people skills in the engineering industry
●    The challenges in working on engineering projects underground and underwater
●    How sustainability and decarbonisation play a role in engineering today
●    The need for innovation and continuous improvement in an ever-evolving industry
●    Career development and ownership, and the importance of being inquisitive.

GUEST DETAILS
Ross Cullen is Group Chief Engineer and Head of Engineering Services at Sisk. He is responsible for developing and leading Engineering strategy for the organisation supporting pre-construction and current projects under construction across Ireland, the UK and Europe. In 2018, Ross established an Engineering Services department in Sisk, growing a business out of the Civil Engineering unit and created an internal consultancy to provide construction engineering consultancy services to the wider Group
Ross is a Chartered Civil Engineer and Fellow of Engineers Ireland and the Institute of Civil Engineers. His background extends from working on complex infrastructure schemes, where he has been central to the design management process. His experience extends across multiple sectors including Infrastructure, Civil Engineering, Marine, Data, Energy, Life Sciences, Commercial and Residential.

Ross is passionate about sustainability and seeking out carbon savings in the construction industry. Ross is chair of the Sisk Low Carbon Concrete working group and is actively involved in several collaborations with industry and academic institutes to support the development of new low-carbon concrete solutions.

QUOTES

"Be inquisitive, ask questions, because people are incredibly generous with their time if you ask the questions and you show an interest."  - Ross Cullen

"You need to take some ownership for your own career. You need to decide fairly early what you like, what you don't like, because it's important to rule out certain things." - Ross Cullen

"You learn from problems. You learn from what's caused you pain. You don't learn from what goes well." - Ross Cullen

"Coming up with a good idea is the easy bit with anything… sometimes making it better isn't the right thing to do." - Ross Cullen

"Construction is a people business, and that's what makes it exciting. You meet different people, different skill sets, extremely diverse." - Ross Cullen

KEYWORDS
#Infrastructure #Engineering #Procurement #Decarbonisation #Mentorship #Sustainability #ProblemSolving #CareerDevelopment #Design #PeopleSkills

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  0:00  
Right now, on AMPLIFIED, we're about to find out what it takes to build big, build green and build better. Straight from an engineer who's done it.

Ross Cullen 0:08
They changed the plan, and they said you're not going to have a shaft to remove the tunnel machine. So instead, we had to come up with a way of taking the entire thing apart and collapsing it in itself and dragging it two kilometres back through the tunnel we had built. And these machines are 130 metres long and weigh 1000 tons.

Dusty Rhodes  0:25  
Today, engineers are expected to deliver complex infrastructure projects and at the same time achieve sustainability targets. While the idea is great, what are the practicalities when you need to tunnel 40 KMs under a major city or tear up half of a suburban landscape for a rail track. We're about to hear some stories about that, plus how to discover the next great thing in engineering and advance your own career. Our guest has 20 years of experience in all of this to share with us, from achieving 70% carbon reductions to tunnelling under the City of London. It's a pleasure to welcome Group Chief Engineer and Head of Engineering services at Sisk, Ross Cullen. Ross, how are you?

Ross Cullen 1.04
I'm very well. Thank you for having me on your show.

Dusty Rhodes  1:06  
Tell me, Ross, how did you get into this weird and wonderful career we have called engineering.

Ross Cullen 1:12
It's called by accident. Jesus, I dunno,I have to go all the way back to spending many years probably lying on my stomach playing with Lego 

Dusty Rhodes 1.22
Good! And it was just in your head? 

Ross Cullen  1.24
Yeah, everyone sort of said, you know, you're quite creative, or you're good at figuring things out. But you know, to be honest, I spent most of my playing sports and enjoying myself. And, you know, thinking about being an engineer was the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, knowing what an engineer was, probably I didn't have a clue, you know everyone say, Oh, you'd be great engineer here. I don't know what that is, but yeah,

Dusty Rhodes  1:45  
Very good. Ross, tell me when you were first getting into the career you saw an ad for Sisk, what attracted you to them in particular?

Ross Cullen  1:53  
Well, it wasn't even and so my career journey after I left college was that I stayed in college. I didn't fancy going out into the big bad world, so I did research for for three years, actually, playing with fresh concrete. And then, you know, seven years was probably enough. Yeah, it's time to go out to the big bad world. But a piece of advice I was given was, you know, what's the rush? Once you start working, you're in. That's it. So, you know, took your time, I suppose. I followed that, and I went and worked for a consultant in the UK on the on the design side. So I did that for for a short period, and then I wasn't scratching the itch. Yeah, it wasn't meeting my needs, I suppose. So I then reached out to Sisk and interesting story, I met two great individuals that were able to give me a better insight of myself than I actually knew, which opened my eyes up to how people can change the trajectory of your career in instant almost.

Dusty Rhodes  2:49  
Why do you say that? What what happened? 

Ross Cullen  2:53  
So It was a great interview. We chatted away for about two and a half hours. I went back to back to Birmingham, and I got a phone call the next day, and it was, we're delighted to tell you that we're not going to offer you the job that we thought we were going to hire you for.

Dusty Rhodes  3:04  
Oh, that's nice.

Ross Cullen 3:06  
So I was like, you're very upbeat about how you're delivering this message. So he's like, Yeah, well, we reckon you're going to get bored and leave. Oh, I said, that's interesting. Tell me more. And they said we got the impression you'd like to be challenged. So we have a proposition for you to come and work with our current chief engineer and to learn from him and to be challenged. And I was sort of like that sounds like, sounds interesting, sounds exciting, and nothing to lose. Why not?

Dusty Rhodes  3:41  
It must have worked quite well, because you've been with Sisk ever since. What are the pros and the cons of being loyal with one company?

Ross Cullen  3:50  
As long as I'm challenged, as long as you're challenged, there's something to achieve, or there's something you can give. You can add value. That's what's important. And I don't see it as 20 years I see it as working on part of a project, another part of a project, different project team. You're working with different people. The beauty about my role as an engineer, that kind of looks after loads of areas, means I get to help lots of projects, lots of teams, and get to work with different people all the time. So that's it's dynamic. It's exciting. I'm helping them, and they're giving me work that challenges me and my team. So it's interesting. Construction is a people business, and that's what makes it exciting. You meet different people, different skill sets, extremely diverse.

Dusty Rhodes  4:35  
Tell me a little bit about your role, because the official title is group chief engineer and head of engineering services. What is it that you do on a day to day to day basis? 

Ross Cullen 4:43  
So I have a team of highly skilled engineers that are broad experience and experts of nothing is the way we control ourselves. So we like to take people's problems on sites. So how do we build a bridge across a big river? How do we get the tower cranes to stand up? How do we get the double basement? To support themselves and not impact the neighbouring buildings. So we take those challenges and we work through them and come up with solutions for the project team. So project teams have endless lists of problems that they're dealing with. We are there to help them take a problem that's frustrating them, we get to work in it and give them back a couple of options or solutions. So we're helping we're helping them. So we get to do that on all the projects across Ireland, UK and Europe, in all the sectors, from data to life sciences to civil engineering to buildings. So it's a variety.

Dusty Rhodes  5:35  
I’m just thinking for somebody who's listening now, and the kind of the more the day to day engineering side of things if they want to make the transition from technical engineering to kind of management or leadership, what kind of skills do you think that they need to brush up on? 

Ross Cullen  5:49  
It really is people skills. You need to have a grounding of good knowledge in your discipline. So as an engineer, you pick up all your skills. You come out of college, you're trained as a problem solver, everything else you have to learn on the job. And you learn from your supervising engineer, your senior engineer, the subcontractors you work with. You're constantly building up knowledge. And you learn from problems. You learn from what's caused you pain. You don't learn from what goes well, because when something goes well, it happens and you go through the motions. But when something goes wrong, you go, Well, what went wrong? And we're trained to think about analyzing, why did that happen? How can we improve it? What are we going to do the next time? So you're constantly learning, and there's different solutions and different tools for every situation. So as you're increasing your toolbox of skills, the more you have in your toolbox, the more equipped you are for then progressing through your career

Dusty Rhodes  6:43  
If you need people's skills, then, is that something that you pick up if you play sport, or is it something that can be learned by doing a course? Or is it just something you pick up as you go along?

Ross Cullen  6:54  
As you said, every facet of life but sport is certainly, I think, if you compare construction and you compare sport, there's a lot of similarities. People in construction like to be part of a team. They work well as a team. And you know, similar dynamics to sports. So you know, you're working for a common goal, and there needs to be alignment on that goal. And obviously a good leader is able to galvanise the team by getting consensus of what that goal is. Because the goal, you know, is is obviously to to ensure everything happens safely, the quality of workmanship is is right, and things are planned and happen on time. And also, the goal is recognising that not everything is going to go to plan all the time. And how do we react defines us. So how do we stop? Assess the situation, figure out what went wrong or what's going to go wrong, reset, move forward.

Dusty Rhodes  7:42  
All right, Ross, let's chat about some of the projects that you've worked over your career. How many projects would you normally work on at a given time or in a year? 

Ross Cullen  7:50  
Oh gosh, we could consult on nearly under projects in a year. But that's like everything from, you know, the gate at the side entrance.

Dusty Rhodes  7:59  
Okay, well, listen, let's pick up on some of the bigger ones. One of the first ones I know that you worked on was the tunnel at Limerick under the Shannon. Tell us a little bit about that.

Ross Cullen  8:15  
Yeah, that's turning back the clock now, dusty. I know, I know it was your first baby. It was my
first baby, and I was, I was sent down. So, yeah, I was learning. Is the only way to describe it, but we all have to learn somewhere. But what a fantastic job it was. It was a four way joint venture, and it was constructing 500 meter long sections of tunnel in the dry dock that we had excavated out of the north of the river. And then we constructed temporary structures through the river banks, and we essentially flooded the dry dock, and one by one, we floated up the 100 meter long tunnel sections and brought them out into the river and sunk them down into a dredge channel and linked them all together. So it was, it was a fascinating job, but I suppose what really stuck by me was I was sort of looking after coordinating a lot of the marine works. And big thing about marine works is you've nowhere to stand. So when people are planning work, you always have to be thinking, Well, where are the people going to be? Where's the equipment going to be? And rule number one of marine works is, get out of the water. Don't get your feet wet. You know, keep everything up on land or structures that you build out in the water that's not going to rely on the tide. So it was interesting, and I got to work with a lot of really experienced people. So there was a number of people working in that job that worked on the jetty and all niche back in 1979 and they had all ended up, after being all over the world with different companies back on this project, some of them towards the tail end of their careers. And someone said to me, pulled me aside one day, and was like, you realize the opportunity you have. Working with all these people, with all this experience, your job is to go and speak to them, extract stories knowledge, get to know them, and try and learn from them. And. And they were all so generous with their time, incredible mentors, and just they challenged me, and I was getting information from them the whole time, and it really gave me a good foundation going forward. So as an engineer, or advice to people coming out of college is Be inquisitive, ask questions, because people are incredibly generous with their time. If you ask the questions, and you're you show an interest, and I genuinely was interested, and I believe that really helped me get my understanding so my my foundation elements.

Dusty Rhodes  10:28  
Do you have any examples of because they say there's no such thing as a stupid question, all right, have you ever asked a stupid question in your life, and how did you feel when you got the answer? I

Ross Cullen 10:38  
I don't have any examples, but I ask stupid questions every day, and I think the more experience and the higher up you get in an organisation, you need to make sure that you're asking questions in the room. And even if it's a silly question, you can ask a question that's sort of segueing off that yeah, because it then shows everyone else that they should be asking questions and invite them in. So providing safety to people to know that you need to be inquisitive. There's no problems with that. In Sisk, everyone asks questions all the time, and it's good to confirm.

Dusty Rhodes  11:13  
It's an engineering trait to ask questions anyway, isn't it? Yes. So there you go. Listen. Another big project that you worked on over the years was a Crossrail in London. Now that's a huge thing. It was going, was going from the west of the city, over near Heathrow, right underneath the city, and over to the far side, to the east, 42 kilometres long. What's the one outstanding memory you have of that gig?

Ross Cullen  11:33  
Oh, it has to be the team. The team. So we were involved in tunnelling from East London through to Farringdon, which is in the centre, and we met the other consortium tunnelling from the west into Farringdon. So they arrived before us, and they swung a hard left and a hard right, and they buried their tunnelling machines. But they got there before us, and we arrived then with our tunnelling machines, and there was nowhere for them to go or to be buried. So the biggest memory, or the best, one of the best memories, was a couple of memories, but some of them were like, you're approaching a station, you have to extract the machine out of the head wall and into the station and drag it through. And you'd be trying to figure out what, how are we going to do that? And you'd be trying to, you'd be working on the engineering, about trying to know, how will we safely receive it into the cavern? Yeah, but you'd be tumbling, and you'd be going towards and every day, it's getting closer and closer and closer, and you're still arguing about, should we do it this way? Should we do it that way? And there comes a point where it's like, we gotta decide. We gotta make a decision, because we're not stopping, you know, so it's pressure comes on, and that they were the best times it was. It was healthy debate, but then it was like healthy debate, but we had a deadline, so let's, let's crack on. 

Dusty Rhodes  12:49  
Can I ask a stupid question? Absolutely, you said that you went left, right, and then you buried the machine. What do you mean exactly by that?

Ross Cullen 12:58  
The the tunnelling machines, they've an outer skin, and then you have all the equipment inside it. So what they do sometimes in tunnelling, if it's, yeah, the tunnel machine is bigger than the tunnel that you make, so you can't take it backwards. And because they were tunnelling first, they had nowhere for it to go, because there was no shaft to take it out. So what they do is they just go off the alignment and and go into the ground. And then they take the machine apart and just leave the outer skin. And then they pump the skin full of grout and leave it there. So, because there was no space left for us, and we were meant to receive a shaft to take it out, and then they they changed the plan, and they said you're not going to have a shaft to remove the tunnelling machine. So instead, we had to come up with a way of taking the entire thing apart and collapsing it in itself and dragging it two kilometres back through the tunnel we had built. And these machines are 130 meters long and weigh 1000 tons. So the first 120 meters are easy to take out, but that the 1012, meters at the front, that's bigger than the tunnel that's that's quite a challenge. So that that was interesting. It was, but we had a we had a great team. Worked with some really, really creative people, solved the problems. It was good.

Dusty Rhodes  14:19  
Listen, getting away from that. You were back in Ireland then, and you were involved in the Lewis cross city project. Did you learn anything from Crossrail, doing the underground tunnels that you were able to apply to overground with Luas?

Ross Cullen 14:31  
I suppose the whole time you're improving your skills and how to deal with people. So different challenges, but the challenges are always with people or involved people. So how do you how do you agree on something? How do you convince people that change is required? Coming up with a good idea is the easy bit with anything. So as engineers, we're always trying to make things better. Sometimes making it better isn't the right thing to do, because. But what's the impact? Is it add value? Does it increase functionality, or does it reduce risk? Is it safer? So you got to weigh up, what are all the elements? And then you got to go, right, okay, we now have to sell this to all the stakeholders that we want to change the plan. And sometimes you have to weigh up, how long is that going to take? How much time and effort is worth it. So I suppose, from cross trail, my learning was, pick your battles. Don't go after everything. Pick, pick what's important, what's going to add the most amount of value? And this is infrastructure we're talking about. It's going to be in place for 100 years plus. So, you know, short term gain or long term so it's about what's right for the stakeholder, what's the ultimate user of this? Is there a benefit to them?

Dusty Rhodes  15:45  
Moving on. Then you were also involved in Pearse Street, the train station in the centre of Dublin, quite a big project. Tell me about that?

Ross Cullen 15:53  
Yeah. So we had to replace the existing structure, the roof structure, over an operational railway line. So we worked with with the client, Irish rail, and the original plan was to close the railway for, I think it was like 13 weekend possessions. And that's fine, in a way, but you've gotta, you've gotta mobilise all your workforce to work these long weekend possessions. So if you do one possession, you know that's okay. It's an awful lot of planning involved. But to do 13 of them is, is the challenge for the supply chain, for the site team, for everyone involved, and it's, it's high pressure, repeated, because you have to hand back the railway after every possession so that the trains can run and people can get to work. Get to work on a Monday morning. So we developed with Irish rail. We have a great relationship with them, and we developed a solution where we built a steel structure over the platforms and over the tracks and the overhead lines, and we built a steel deck, and then we put a platform which moved along the station with a high up crane. So, you know, the knuckle boom cranes that you have on the back of trucks. We bought one of those, and we modified it and put it on a steel steel frame, and we had that above the railway tracks, and we used that to demolish the existing roof and to build the new roof in stick base. So we took a truss and we installed it in sort of three components, and prop it as we as we put it together. So we moved this window along the whole length of the station of taking the trusses out, putting the new ones in, doing the glazing and the finishing works. And it meant that we could operate on a Monday to Friday during the daytime. We could have all our steel and glazers and our fitters all working in a normal sort of shift pattern. So you have people that are, you know, not working all weekend. You're not dealing with fatigue, you're not under high pressure situations to hand back the railway after each weekend. So there are benefits to it. And ultimately, we ended up with replacing the roof successfully. The client got what, what they wanted. Our supply chain wanted to work a normal shift pattern. And it was, we was a great success, but it shows that you know, you have to have good relationships between the contractor, between the client, you have to have trust, and you have to make sure that you're doing it for the right reasons. So we were doing it ultimately, for safety, really, because it's a high pressure situation, and if you're against the clock all the time to hand back an asset, it's not a position you want to put people in working late at night, long hours.

Dusty Rhodes  18:41  
Ross, I'd like to move on to a topic that is just huge in engineering and for the planet in general, and that's sustainability and decarbonising and that whole thing. I know you're quite interested in decarbonising construction. When you talk about decarbonising construction, what do you mean?

Ross Cullen  19:00  
I mean using materials that emit less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in their production. Okay, so if you take concrete, for example, is made with cement, and typical cement is produced by burning limestone and shale, and it emits that process emits carbon dioxide. So 8% of global emissions of carbon dioxide is from the producing cement.

Dusty Rhodes  19:23  
Okay, is another silly question. Is there such a thing as decarbonised concrete?

Ross Cullen  19:29  
There will be, I suppose. And this is the question, yeah. So there's lots of talk about different technologies which can be developed. But if you take the existing process, which is universal, there are talking about trying to do carbon store and capture, so taking the carbon that's emitted during the chemical process, and you're capturing it and storing it somewhere. That's one way. Or there's other products, like geopolymer type cements and concretes that actually don't involve. Of burning limestone and emitting carbon dioxide, so that there are other technologies, but the likes of a geopolymer concrete, you're never going to create the same volume that's required to replace all the cement that's produced globally. Okay, so I think when we talk about decarbonising construction, I think first of all, we got to look at so before looking at any sort of technology improvements in producing cement or different products, we need to use our resources wisely. So that means making sure that we have efficient designs that use the appropriate amount of concrete. So that means leaner design. But at the same time, we're designing the infrastructure that lasts for 120 years, so you have to make sure that you strike the right balance. So it's really important. It's a safety issue.

Dusty Rhodes  20:49  
So keeping all that in mind, then, are you working on it, on any initiatives, or anything new to do with low carbon concrete? 

Ross Cullen  20:55  
Good question Dusty. So we have a couple of initiatives that we've been involved in. So we're working with universities here in Ireland to assist in developing cements using industrial byproduct. So that's research that that's ongoing, and our part to play as a contractor is we want to support and facilitate. So when it comes to doing, say, a site trial that we will we will facilitate and make some resources available and some space available to produce this concrete and build a small, say, demonstrator of test piece on our project, so that we can then see how it performs, because what's done in the lab needs to be replicated in real life. Yeah, so that that's one example. And then another example was in the UK. We applied for funding, and we were successful in a consortium of seven bodies, and we built a low carbon, scalable demonstrator in the UK, and we achieved a 70% carbon reduction, which isn't insignificant. And the whole purpose, or the what was interesting about it was, it was, how do they call it? It was described as boring. So the concrete looked the same, right? Flowed the same, yeah, set the same. So, in terms of using a product that's globally the same, well, not all concrete, it's the same, but it flowed the same. It went into the shutters the same. When the shutters were struck, it reached the same strengths. And, you know, so, so we were able to demonstrate that that a low carbon concrete technology is the same, but with less carbon,

Dusty Rhodes  22:29  
When you're trying to do something new and you're trying to bring it, and this applies not just to your team, but also when you are, you know, kind of working with other people, like clients or interested parties and that kind of thing, and you're trying to do something new. What kind of kind of approach do you take if they're kind of gone “ah I'm not sure.”

Ross Cullen  22:48  
As engineers, we base everything on on fact, on numbers, yeah, on being able to predict what it's going to be, how it's going to behave. So we deal in the in the black and white. Absolutely.

Dusty Rhodes  23:00  
Listen. Let me ask you about looking for those things and finding newer ways of doing things, and how to how do you find these things? 

Ross Cullen  23:11  
Well we've got a great team here, and we explore what's out there in the market, different techniques, different materials. There's always people innovating. And if you talk to enough people, you'll find out who's innovating and who's coming up with different products, and it's just about exploring them or different forms. Or let's just take a building. Typically, people don't want any internal columns. They want big free spaces. But in apartment buildings and stuff. You don't need all those big free spaces, because the grids can be rationalised. So you can, you can then economise on the size of the columns. You can reduce the floor thickness. You can use less concrete and all these type of areas, and not really impact on the on the structure. And if you, if you sort of refine every thing in the building a little bit, you make a big saving. So it's incremental. Our marginal gains is where there are, where there are savings

Dusty Rhodes  24:09  
And it’s just kind of keeping your radar open. I mean, do you solely rely on talking to people within the industry to find new things, or do you look at particular websites or YouTube channels or particular TV shows?

Ross Cullen 24:19  
That’s a good question. I mean, I suppose we're all dialled into everything. It comes down to our networks. And if I roll back to right at the beginning of my career, talk to people, learn from them, and the more people you get to know, the more bits information you get you you know, you read you read the trade press, and you find out what's going on. And as contractors, we're always trying to push the boundaries. We're always looking for what's the next thing out there. How can we deliver? Because it's a very competitive market, how can we deliver savings to the customer and not impact the functionality of what's being delivered? So and they the customer is also challenging us more and more, especially. And sustainability perspective, how can we lower the embodied carbon in our assets? They're asking us. So we're then coming along and well, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this, and it becomes a shopping list, but sometimes that shopping list then pushes the price up. So what's the cost that they are willing to pay? Sometimes to reduce because to use less materials. So if you go back to say, maybe the 70s or 80s. And you go around say, UCD, you'll see what's called, like waffle slabs. So you'll see the soffit of the roofs, and they're all waffle shaped. And that's because it uses less concrete. Less concrete is less carbon, less materials. But to build waffle slabs is it's slower, uses more labor. So you know, material versus labor versus time. Time is money. Labor costs money. Yeah 

Dusty Rhodes  25:48  
Everything has to be factored in. I'd like to ask you a couple of questions just about kind of moving on in your career, because I believe that you speak about how understanding yourself is key to owning your career. What do you mean when you say that?

Ross Cullen  26:04  
That's a good question. When we have graduates come in, we do a day talking about, you know, engineering and what we do in technical services, or engineering services in terms of providing support to the projects. But I always spend a bit of time telling them, I suppose my story about, you need to be inquisitive. You need to you need to take ownership for your own career. Because people, they leave university, they enter into graduate programs, and we're very structured graduate programs to try and give as much opportunity to learn in an accelerated fashion. These engineers to get them across all the disciplines and to learn, but they reach a point where they get to the end of that graduate program, where it's sort of being laid out in front of them, and we need to, they need to learn from an early stage that you need to take some ownership for your own career. You need to decide fairly early what you like, what you don't like, because it's important to rule out certain things. And if you want to stay motivated, you need to do what you love. You know I love what I do, I skip into work every day, and that's because I was clear about what I didn't want to do early in my career, and I wanted to be challenged. So that's the route I went. Yeah, yeah. So people need to own their careers. That's my advice to young engineers. Ask questions and figure out what you don't like as well as what you do like.

Dusty Rhodes  27:18  
And I think you've also said that engineering is a passport to opportunity.

Ross Cullen  27:23  
That's correct. Yes, I mean, gravity is the same the world over. There are obviously intricacies in terms of codes and standards. It's a very much. It's a people on the contracting side. It's a people business. So, you know, you learn how to deal with people and problems. So look, if you're a good engineer, the possibilities are the opportunities are endless, and that's how I ended up in in London for five years. It was, here's an opportunity. Yep, let's go. And so it's a great opportunity to travel and learn different cultures and learn from people with different cultures, because that's how you you know that's how you hone your skills. You can't just work with the same people all the time you won't learn. You need diversity. And construction is a very it's very diverse.

Dusty Rhodes  28:04  
When you were coming up the ranks yourself. Ross, did you ever have a mentor? Did you use somebody like that?

Ross Cullen  28:10  
Yes, so my previous chief engineer was, was my mentor. He kind of challenged me all the way through my career and and let me make my mistakes to learn in a safe way. And I think it's really important to build a good relationship with your mentor. And it works both ways. And you know, it's it's really important, but you can have a mentor or a line manager, but there you can have several, because, you know, you learn off each other, so that there are always accidental mentoring opportunities for everyone in the industry. I think,

Dusty Rhodes  28:47  
Well, if you'd like to find out more about Ross and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and links and details in the description area of the podcast. But for now, Ross Cullen group, Chief Engineer and head of engineering services at Sisk. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing so much with us. 

Ross Cullen 29.04
Thank you, Dusty. 

Dusty Rhodes 29.06
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities. There are libraries of information on the website at engineers ireland.ie Until next time from myself, dusty roads. Thank you for listening.
 

What does it take to stay at the cutting edge of technology while also fostering innovation, sustainability, and personal growth? 

Today, we explore how one global powerhouse continues to reinvent itself in Ireland through groundbreaking projects, strategic acquisitions, and a deep investment in people. From historic feats like the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme to the rise of digital and AI, this episode covers the past, present, and future of engineering excellence. We’ll uncover how digitalisation is revolutionising infrastructure, and why a culture of continuous learning and collaboration is now more critical than ever. 

Our guest began his journey as an apprentice electrician and rose through the ranks to help shape the future of one of Ireland’s most innovative engineering and technology companies. Now serving as General Manager and Head of Fire and Security Solutions at Siemens Ireland, it’s a pleasure to welcome Joe Walsh to the podcast.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
How the Ardnacrusha legacy still matters today’s engineering landscape 
Building a career from apprentice electrician to General Manager of Siemens Ireland 
Leveraging AI, digital twins, and automation to transform infrastructure
Tackling global challenges like sustainability and resource efficiency
Culture, collaboration & lifelong learning: a people-first approach

GUEST DETAILS
​Joe Walsh is the General Manager of Siemens Limited in Ireland, a role he has held since November 2021. He also heads the company's Solutions and Services division, overseeing areas such as fire safety, electronic security, building automation, and smart lighting.
​
Joe is deeply committed to advancing sustainable and digital technologies, playing a pivotal role in projects like the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme and initiatives aimed at decarbonising data centres through renewable energy and green hydrogen solutions. His leadership extends to standardisation efforts, serving as Chair of the NSAI TC16 Working Group on Fire Detection and Alarm Systems, where he has been instrumental in modernising Ireland's fire safety standards.
​
Known for his authentic leadership style, Joe emphasises collaboration, continuous learning, and innovation. His dedication to these principles has been central to Siemens' century-long presence and ongoing success in Ireland.​

https://ie.linkedin.com/in/joewalsh1965 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/   

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
'Where is my passion? It's to take the current business that we have and the model that we have and bring it into the future.' - Joe Walsh 

'We work really hard to create a sense of belonging and ownership.' - Joe Walsh 

'It's not what you know today. It's more about how you learn. That's the real trick.' - Joe Walsh 

'We have a term we use in Siemens, if Siemens knew what Siemens knows. Experience is the sum of your mistakes.'  - Joe Walsh 

KEYWORDS
#Engineering #Challenges #Siemens #Infrastructure #Fire #AI #DigitalTwins #Sustainability #Innovation #Leadership

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:04
Engineering is all about solving real-world challenges, making our cities smarter, infrastructure safer, and industries more efficient.

Joe Walsh  00:11
You know, whether it's a project not going right or or anything else, you will find that in Siemens, they're very, very likely going to be many other people in other countries who have had the same problems, more importantly, had the same solutions. So there's always somebody to turn to, there's always somebody to get advice from. There's always somebody who has been in that situation. We have a term we use in Siemens. If Siemens knew what Siemens knows.

Dusty Rhodes  00:42
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes. Welcome to Amplified the Egineers Journal Podcast today, we're exploring the future of infrastructure, the critical role of safety and sustainability and the leadership qualities that it takes to get us there. Our guest will be sharing insights on the importance of fire and engineering, how their company undertook one of Ireland's first-ever major infrastructure projects, and how they are driving innovation towards our future. It's a pleasure to welcome the General Manager and Executive Director at Siemens Limited Ireland, Joe Walsh, how are you? 

Joe Walsh  01:14
Yeah, thanks, Dusty. I'm fine. No problems. Looking forward to our chat.

Dusty Rhodes  01:23
Well, listen, let's start off with if someone was to look at your career. I mean, it's pretty clear to see the fire is your thing? Is there a particular story that you can tell us that first sparked your interest in fire and engineering?

Joe Walsh  01:37
I started as an apprentice, I served my time as an electrician, and I totally enjoyed that, and I learned some fantastic life skills during that process. Now they were different times, and lots of things about the construction industry were completely different than they are today. And then as I came to the end of that, of course, these were in the days we didn't have aI at that point, but I knew that I wanted a little bit more. So I actually went back to school and did some industrial electronics. And that then opened up other doors with the background of the electrical trade and the electronics opened up specialties. Let's put it that way. So there's lots of specialties around the electrical industry, whether that's Power Factor or heating and ventilation. As it happens, my first job was actually with a telephone company. But again, you know, with the combination of Electrical and Electronics, those sorts of things open up. And then from there, I got a job in an Irish company, and they were doing fire detection systems. So I have to say, I totally enjoyed that role. And I was able to use, you know, the very practical skill set that I had from the electrical industry and the electronics and get into this for detection and alarm systems. And that was great. That was a great time. That was a small Irish company called champion for a defense, and that would that was really a lot of good learning in there. One of the, one of the things I learned very quickly was this equipment is not going to give me any trouble at all. You know, you learn the equipment very easily. It either does it or it doesn't do it. And if it doesn't do it, you find out why, and you solve it and you move on. The real challenge was always going to be around people and delivering projects.

Dusty Rhodes  03:52
Let's move on and chat about Siemens, because Siemens has been established in Ireland for a century, at this stage, 100 years, and the company's first gig here was, it was big. Tell me everything.

Joe Walsh  04:08
Well, I mean, we're very proud 2025 we celebrate our centenary. So we're very proud that we have been in Ireland and we have been supporting the Irish economy in all of that time. Of course, it started in 1925, we were incorporated in 1925, and the reason we were incorporated was to build the Shannon scheme at Ardnacrusha. And that really was a fantastic project. There are so many aspects to that project, but generally speaking, if you just imagine, at that time, that was our first government, we weren't long nailed of a very nasty Civil War, and there was still a lot of lingering tensions at that time, and many parts of Europe. Were still coming out of the disaster of World War One. So it was an uncertain time, and a young Siemens engineer, Thomas McLaughlin, he was working for he was from Dundalk, and he was working for Siemens in Berlin. And he went to his bosses in Siemens. Siemens had done some hydro electric plants in Europe, and he put it to them that there was a fantastic opportunity to harness the power of the Shannon and they got on board with that, and they they put together a white paper, and they presented it to the forced Irish government. The investment was 5.2 million Sterling, which at the time was 20% of GDP. I think, don't quote me on this, but I think in today's money, that's probably about 25 billion. So either way, it's a very large sum, which in itself, was a very large risk. But to be fair, the forced government, they had the courage, because they could see that taking Ireland from a rural, non industrial society into an industrial society where we could bring power into every house and every farm, made perfect sense. And there was, there was, there was pressure on that government at the time not to invest so much in Ardnacrusha rather to do something on the Liffey do something smaller. But they stuck with it, and they they didn't just give the contract to Siemens, by the way, they went to Europe, and they took some second opinions from other countries in Scandinavia and Switzerland, to go through the white paper to see, were there any, you know, big gaps in it. But anyway, there weren't. And we started in 1925 as a baby country, just you know, kind of emerging into the world.

Dusty Rhodes  06:59
How many people did it take to build that facility there.

Joe Walsh  07:08
At the height of the construction, there was up to 5000 people employed. Now that number was a combination of German engineers from Siemens who were on site and lived on site. And then lots of local labor. And when I say local labor, that was from all over Ireland. It wasn't just from Limerick and Clare. There was labor from all over Ireland. Involved in Ireland Crusher, because there was there was there was work.

Dusty Rhodes  07:40
So at the height it was 5000 and when the project was finished, then began generating power. How much of the country's power did it generate?

Joe Walsh  07:47
Well, remember, we were starting at zero, right? More or less starting at zero, right? So it generates 83 megawatts, which at that time was enough to power the entire country at that time today. It's a walking power station today. And today, it continues to generate. And it depending on the particular day and how much wind is blowing, and other variables, it generates between two and 3% depending on what ESB need on the network at that time. So at the time, it was 87 megawatts, which was easily enough to power the nation. Because remember, you know, if you went into a household at that point, it was just one life and one stopper. Entirely different, entirely different today.

Dusty Rhodes  08:39
I mean, I know, but it's phenomenal to think, like, you know, when you think of Ireland and the pictures that you have of the Civil War, and I always think of the Michael Collins movie and stuff like that, like, you know, to think that the company came in here, it started here, took on that massive project with so many 1000 people. I was generating electricity for the entire just getting electricity to the entire country, as well as building the plant was was a phenomenal achievement. And then when you think that 100 years later, it's still working, I can't think of very many engineering companies today, or very many companies today, can kind of go well, we did this gig 100 years ago, and it's still working. 

Joe Walsh  09:19
I can tell you, in Ardnacrusha at the ESB team who look after Ardnacrusha, they welcome visitors. And if you go and see it, it's really powerful, and it's it's very inspiring to see how passionate the ESB staff are about the place. I mean, I was actually there last week. And the takeaway, you know, looking at the head race and the drop and the tail race and the turbines, that's really powerful engineering. It's fantastic scale of engineering. But that's not what I took away. What. What I took away was the passion that the ASB staff have for the place the heart is in it. Let me just leave it at that the heart is in it, and that that was my takeaway when I walked away last week.

Dusty Rhodes  10:13
But when you get into, you know, kind of an industry like engineering, people get into it because they like it, and there's a challenge, and they do have a passion for it. In your own position at the moment, at the head of Siemens, what passion do you have at the moment for what? What are your passion projects?

Joe Walsh  10:31
Well, there, there are lots of different projects. And I mean, since Ardnacrusha, we have been involved in lots of varied projects. I mean, just just for example, after Ardnacrusha, we continue to work with ESB. Today, we continue to work with ESB. We were very much involved with the turbines in Turlock hill. We did the electrification of the Dart. We did the baggage handling system in terminal two of Dublin airport. We did the first CT scanner in Ireland. We did the first MRI in Ireland. And we continue to work with all sorts of industries, whether they're Irish industries or international industries. We work behind the scenes, helping them on their journey towards sustainability and digitalisation. Now to answer So, sort of the projects are very varied, but to answer your question, uh, what? Where's my passion? I mean, it's to take the current business that we have and the model that we have and bring it into the future. So if you peel back Siemens and open it up. We are in our DNA and engineering, an engineering company. We have been selling solutions and products for years, and we would have this very strong brand that if you buy a piece of kit or you buy a solution from Siemens, it's going to work, and it's going to work into the long term. So that's all great stuff, but we are also do a lot of work with software, and the real where we can really get our teeth into it is the next phase whereby we use the software to connect all of our good hardware, get it into the cloud and then collect the data and use AI to analyze the data. And what that really and truly does is it enables our customers to increase their efficiency around resources or energy. So that's the that's the journey we're on now. We have always been we've always been good at engineering. We've always been good at innovating and putting time and effort into r, d, that's always been in our DNA. But the next phase, when you look forward, is the software piece to grow, the software part of Siemens and accelerate all of the good stuff that the hardware can do.

Dusty Rhodes  13:07
You mentioned AI. So let me ask you about that. Where is AI playing a part in your in your operations now, and where do you see it? Maybe in, I gotta say, 10 years just, just for the crack to put you under pressure.

Joe Walsh  13:20
Okay, great question. So where, where are we today, with AI? Well, my answer to that is really simple. We are all of us, whether it's Siemens or whether it's engineers or LinkedIn, it doesn't really matter. We are all surrounded by AI. Make no mistake about that. We all you utilise AI. So Aoi is everywhere. Where we see it in Siemens at the moment is we are using AI around the tools that we use. So, you know, we see these improvements coming all of the time. I'll give you a very good, tangible example of AI now in a moment, but to answer the next part of it, I mean, where is it going to be in 10 years? Well, I don't think anybody can really answer that, but what I can say is this, we're all going to be in a different place. And there is no question at all that everybody, everybody's role, or everybody's day-to-day, will be different, and AI will be behind the scenes making it different. There's absolutely, absolutely no question in my mind about that, exactly where that brings us to in 10 years time. Well, that's going to be fascinating to watch. And what I would say to you is, wherever that landing place is, you'll find Siemens right at the heart of it. And the reason I say that, and the reason I say that with confidence, there's no doubt in my mind, because just recently, Siemens have invested hugely on the software side. So we've just recently acquired a US software company called. Altar. And even more recently, the next acquisition was another company called dot Matrix. Now what these did, these are now acquired by Siemens. Can you believe that investment was 15 billion for both of them, 10 and five? And what that will really do is bring on. We, we already use digital twins, but it's going to bring digital twins to the next level. So we, as I say, we're already using digital twins. So I mean this, this is really and truly where we're going to get into resource efficiency, where, boy, you actually build your project. So imagine Ardnacrusha it in 1925 we in our headquarters and down on site. They still have a lot of the drawings and all done by hand and fantastic engineering work, fantastic. But if we were doing art in a crush it today, we would build it digitally, and we would, we would do that, and by doing it digitally, and digitally, we can utilise our skill sets all around Siemens, so it wouldn't be just a team in ornick. It could be anywhere. And you can bring in your customer, and you can do your testing, and then eventually hand over the digital twin, and you've made all the mistakes. This is where you make your mistakes. You make your mistakes digitally. You correct them, you test, you retest, you agree, that's it, and then you then you hand that to the builder who goes and builds it to that specification. So the acquisition of Altair and dogmatics, dogmatics is very focused on the life science industry. And life science is is an area that we we support a lot of companies in Ireland, but we kind of work behind the scenes. You wouldn't see or hear that much of us, but we're behind the scenes supporting those companies on their journey. But to give you a tangible, concrete example, and you started this discussion up talking about the fire industry. So here we go. So last year, we have had a relationship with the Irish prison service for many years, and what we've been doing with the prison service is providing life safety systems in 11 of the prisons in Ireland, and with the advance of technology, what we did with the prison service last year was we took eight of those 11 and we upgraded them such that we connected them to the cloud. So before we did that, our teams would go on the site, and they would manually test each sensor. Nothing wrong with that. But now what we're doing is we're increasing the frequency of testing because we're connected to the cloud. We're standardising the testing so every detector is tested exactly in the same way, so that's improving the performance. But, and this is where it gets really interesting, because of that application, when Ergo is or anybody goes into a prison, any contractor goes into a prison, they have to be escorted. Can't just walk into a prison and walk so by taking the testing to an entirely different platform. We've increased the quality of the testing, and we've reduced the Escort time. So that's real value. Back to the prison service, and now, because all of this stuff is being done in the cloud, all of the records, because records around for a safety are really important. But all of those records are now available in the cloud, and we can give those back to the customer in whatever format they want, so they can look at it a phone or a laptop or a PC or whatever they want, and it's all it's all in perfect condition, and it's there forever. So there, that's a very real, tangible example of the technology that we had, which is fantastic technology. No problems with the kit, with transforming it, with the use of the cloud and ao. And what will happen there is, you know, as AI develops, will be able to do more with that connection.

Dusty Rhodes  19:25
Yeah, and with all that consistent testing, the AI is able to monitor so many millions of data points like every second. But I'm quite sure that one day, instead of kind of going, Ah, we've discovered a problem. I need an engineer here to help me, the AI will go and I'll fix it myself.

Joe Walsh  19:44
Well, you think, to summarise it, what it does is it changes the routine from reactive to proactive, so the AI gets ahead and can see much. Much better than any human that, oh, there's something about that sensor I don't quite like, but it will get that way before any human intervention would so you so you're preventing problems as opposed to reacting to them.

Dusty Rhodes  20:15
Let me ask you, as the man at the top right, because Siemens do so many amazing things, but they're all different things. Okay, how do you with your team in Ireland foster a culture of of creativity and problem solving?

Joe Walsh  20:31
Oh, that's a good question. I would, I would, I'd answer that simply by saying that what we we work really hard. We work really hard to create a sense of belonging and ownership. And if we can do that, and people feel that they are part of the company. To give you an example, if you look at the global numbers, there's over 300,000 employees today, more than 50% of those own shares and Siemens. So that gives you a sense of ownership. Now, you may not be a big shareholder, but you own a part of Siemens. And if we then try and give everybody a self as a sense of belonging. What we're really trying to do is to bring every member of staff and get them to fulfill their potential. So I'm not quite answering the innovation piece of that. What I'm really saying to you is this is no different. We're no different to any industry or any sector. We are just some of our people. And if we can, if we can foster belonging and ownership, well then now, now we can start to think about innovation. And when we talk about innovation and Siemens, it's a great story. Again, I'll throw a figure at you. Last year we invested, when we we finished the last financial year, we invested over 5 billion in R D. That's the global figure, obviously. So innovation is in our DNA. A lot of that innovation, again, if you just think about my role Siemens in Ireland. So we are like a sales office and the interface with our customer, but behind the scenes, we have our headquarter, and this is one of the advantages that we have. So we have very long term relationships with our customer, and then we can bring in the innovation from the headquarters and the power of the headquarters. And when you do that, and you do that time and time and time again over the course of the last 100 years, what you find is innovation becomes part of what we do. So there's no simple answer to well, you know, we tell people to to go home and dream up new ideas. It's more of a culture, and it's built upon long term and and trying to keep our staff and keep them, keep them learning.

Dusty Rhodes  23:16
I was going to ask you that because, I mean, everything is evolving, and engineering is evolving, and it's at such a high level at the moment. How do you keep learning and staying ahead? I mean, how do you do that for the people working with you? How do you do it for yourself? 

Joe Walsh  23:30
Yeah, it's not easy. It's a life is busy. Life is busy, and it's really a question of priorities. And I mean, the day job takes up a lot of time, and it takes up a lot of energy. So you know, you only have a certain resource left. But you know, when it comes to the learning to be fair, to be fair to Siemens, well, what we have done is we have created a suite of learning. So again, I have to put it back into the headquarters, because it's centralised and it's available to every member of staff. So I can go on to Siemens now, and I can type in AI, and a multiple of courses will pop up in front of me, and I can do them virtually, and I can do them at my own time and pace, and it doesn't really matter what you type in. I could I could put in business excellence. I could put in logistics or a COVID in HR, all of the all of the business categories are in there, and they're all available to every member of staff. But making it available is one thing. It's really to try and get the culture such that they have some time and space to actually do it, and that's, that's where the real trick is, because it's very much the pace the world is going at. It's not, it's not what you know today. It's more about how you learn. That's the real trick. And trying to, trying to give our staff to. Space to get the day job done and do some learning. And that's the real challenge.

Dusty Rhodes  25:07
Have you yourself worked on a project that didn't go to to plan, and what did you learn from it? I see that look, I've worked on loads of projects that they can go to plan. What's In My Head is you're talking about doing the courses. So it's great. You're learning academically about things that might happen. Then you're on a job, and you're learning things as you go along, because you're presented with problems, you're going, Oh God, what are we going to do here? And you figure it out. I'm trying to figure out the difference. To get an example from yourself about a project that wasn't going quite to plan. What did you learn from it?

Joe Walsh  25:42
It's a great question, and anybody in my position will tell you that. Excuse me, there are many projects that don't go the way you want them to go, whether that's, you know, cost, or whether that's delays or whatever resource, whatever there's, lots of different reasons. So what we do in Siemens is we have developed a means by which we deliver so we call it project management at Siemens. So we break the project into stages. So the four stages, let's say the sales stage, actually. So that's very much at the sales stage, and then you reach a point where that becomes an instruction from the customer. And now we hand over to our execution, and when we go through the execution, we install a whole series of quality dates. Now that doesn't guarantee that the project may not go wrong. I mean, there are so many stakeholders in a project, and you know, you you take any of the large projects, generally speaking, they're going to be led by the Civil company, the civil construction company, and then there'll be mechanical and electrical companies, and then there'll be all sorts of specialist companies, and there'll be all sorts of time pressures. So there are multiple stakeholders, and once you have multiple stakeholders, obviously the risk increases. So what we're trying to do is to get through it stage by stage and pass each quality gate. And we we have standardized that in Siemens, because we had lots of projects that didn't go right all around the world. And again, you know, whether it's a project not going right or or anything else, you will find that in Siemens there's very, very likely going to be many other people in other countries who have had the same problems. More importantly, had the same solutions. So there's always somebody to turn to, there's always somebody to get advice from. There's always somebody who has been in that situation. We have a term we use in Siemens. If Siemens knew what Siemens know, it's very simple. It really is very simple because we, we have, you know, somebody says, you know, what is experience? Well, experience is the sum of your mistakes. It's another way to say it, it's the sum of your mistakes. But the real trick is to learn from them and and to keep that learning continuous.

Dusty Rhodes  28:23
'If only Siemens knew what Siemens knows'. What about if only Joe Walsh knew what Joe Walsh actually knows? If you could go back to yourself in your mid 20s, what piece of career advice would you give yourself?

Joe Walsh  28:40
Oh, I know. I'm not sure that I have anything really profound.

Dusty Rhodes  28:44
No, it doesn't have to be anything profound, practical.

Joe Walsh  28:47
I would always be on the practical side. I said to you at the outset, some of the best learning I did was when I was in an apprentice, and at that time in that environment, you didn't really get much time or space. You're expected to be on time, you're expected to get it done. You're expected to have all your stuff and next, do it all again, and next and next. And you really didn't get a lot of space, which in itself, was a fantastic learning. So if I was to go back, I think what I'd be saying are might sound, might sound old fashioned now, but fundamentally, you know, get your keyed into it and bring, bring your whole self to it. And if you bring your whole self to it, and you work with good colleagues, things tend to tend things tend to work out. And of course there'll be problems, and of course there'll be difficulties. But when, when you encounter those difficulties, you really don't have many choices. You've got to step back and ask yourself, well, what is this problem? What are the options, though, do I have? And then take some some advice. So. Today, I have no difficulty telling you I have a very close working relationship with our CEO, CFO, and I speak to him. I could speak to him on a daily basis. I certainly speak to him every second day. And you know when, when you're doing that and you're picking up from other people who have different skill sets, generally speaking, generally speaking, to take the right options when you when you find your you have a hurdle to jump over. So to answer your question, Dorsey, I don't have anything profound to say, other than if you're going to get into a job or you're going to take on a task within a job, bring your whole self and and and apply yourself, and things generally work out and when they you know when, when you feel the pressure, because you will feel the pressure. Go and seek advice. Go and seek advice from colleagues who who understand you and get it and will will be able to give constructive advice. I've heard a lot of advice out there. I would think, Oh, not sure. I'm going to take that advice. So, so, you know, you need, you need to be, you need to be selective as to who, yeah, who you engage with. I'm very much

Dusty Rhodes  31:17
the same myself in that people ask me, you know, how do you do these things? And I would say, just take the first step. Is exactly what you say. It's just get stuck in. Just do something, and problems will occur. And as you say, you learn to figure them out. You learn to get advice from other people, and you learn from other people, and all that kind of stuff. And that's what makes the world interesting. I'm absolutely fascinated with you, Joe, because you've been in the industry for a while, but yet you're still really passionate and you're very supportive of people. What keeps you motivated?

Joe Walsh  31:51
I would say, to see there's, there's a series of answers to that, right? The reality of my story is I come from a humble background. My dad was a butcher, and unfortunately he lost his wife, my mother when we were very young, so he found himself with five kids, the eldest night. So that was a tough environment, but he had this fantastic attribute of being able to see the best in people. So that's always in the back of my mind. How can you bring out the best in somebody else? That's that's always there. And I look back that far to where did that come from? That's where it comes from. That's for me, that's where it comes from. And you know, how do you keep it fresh today. Well, I don't struggle with that actually. I mean, in the role that I'm doing, it's always busy, it's always on. And because of my nature, I think it suits me. I like it. I like it when it's on. I like to be proactive. I like to get my teeth into things and that garbage come relatively easy to me. I've never, I Well, I think it's fair to say I've never, you know, got out of bed and think, Oh, my God, I have to go to work today. That's, that's never been my modus operandi, my I've always got up early and go and see where it takes me. So I don't know it's, it's in my DNA. It's not something that I work on. It's not something that I'm I'm not looking in the mirror practicing, you know, it's just in my DNA, and I give it my best shot.

Dusty Rhodes  33:30
Would it be fair to say that you're a man who likes a challenge, finding a problem, fixing it, that kind of stuff. Is that what keeps you young?

Joe Walsh  33:38
I like to get my teeth into things, but I'm not trying. I'm not trying. I'm not trying to change the world. I mean, what I the way it would, the way it would respond to that is it's very rewarding when you get involved in a project. I'll give you an example, real life example. So I said to you at the outset, we're very proud that we have reached the centenary in Norman. We're very proud of that, and we're very proud of the role we've played to support government and industry. But in 2024 we had to start to think about the centenary. But what are we going to do about this? And we put together a small team, and we celebrated in January, and that small team was a Siemens team, and we set up a small working group with ESB, because ESB played such a huge role in Ardnacrusha and electrical in the nation, they were very much part of that story. And we also also in the working group, we had the Department of Energy. So when we finished it, it was very rewarding. It was very tough going now, but it was very rewarding. And the rewarding piece that for me was not that it was my gig. It wasn't my gig. It was a collective effort of a small team in Siemens and the team in ESB. And a team in the Department of Energy, and that's really what, what inspires me. It's not so much that I'm going to be a lone wolf, that that's that that doesn't do it for me. And I know that does for some people, but that's not really me. The the preparations for the centenary with those small teams, that's really and truly work. Those are for myself.

Dusty Rhodes  35:23
Well, listen, Joe, just over the last half hour or so, I've learned, I mean, a lot about engineering, which I was kind of expected to but you've told me so much about life and things that you say about, you know, career and working with other people, and the importance of looking after yourself at the same time as well. So many gems of wisdom in there. I can't thank you enough. If you'd like to find out more about Joe and some of the topics that we did have a chat about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of the podcast. But for now, Executive Director and General Manager Siemens Ireland limited Joe Walsh, thank you so much. 

Joe Walsh  35:55
Thanks, Dusty. Thoroughly enjoyed that. Much obliged.

Dusty Rhodes  35:59
And if you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for engineers Ireland AMPLIFIED in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland for advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities, there are libraries of information the website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time, from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.