A vaunted software expert when asked whether he would advise his children to follow a mainframe computer software career, concluded he would recommend law or medicine. “Those are jobs where you can live and work in a county town or even small village, rather than having to live in major cities,” was his wistful comment.
Not that location matters much for those with a driving urge to work at their vocation. Anyone whose ambition involves electronics and any aspect of product development, test, prototyping, supply chain management, or contract manufacturing and engineering services, should have considered that nirvana which is Plexus. Having recently opened a design centre, the firm has now recruited two software engineers, and is looking for more digital hardware expertise and, that skill rarity, a mechanical engineer.
“Over the next six months,” says Plexus engineering manager, John Simpson, “we will be looking for another digital hardware engineer, another embedded software talent and a project manager.” He adds that the company does not recruit directly on the back of current demand, but is growing its design team organically, to ensure a balanced structure.
Plexus is one of a rare handful of ‘cradle to grave’ global product realisation companies, with a Scottish base for design in Livingston and manufacture at Kelso, in the Scottish borders. Malcolm Price, project manager at the Design Centre at the Alba Campus, Livingston, is proud of Plexus’ local progress from ISO9001 to achieving the ISO13485 standard qualified design module.
As Price points out “the really tight process enables us to work for traceability and high quality process development”. Medical devices is among the growth sectors to require the standard.
The Plexus route to staff acquisition is initially by networking and word of mouth. “Pretty well a third of the people here came by this route,” says Simpson, who notes that not only does this process find the right people who are happy to work at Plexus, but also provides an instant reference. The design technology group has an almost minimal staff turnover, at one in five years.
“We also find that Talent Scotland provides a good focus for electronics,” he says. Plexus does work with other preferred agencies, though Simpson admits that no Scottish agency as yet offers engineering as a specialist sector.
The attraction of joining the company and contentment in working for it may well lie in the fact that Plexus customers include high-tech start-up companies and global OEMs across a range of markets which includes wireless infrastructure, wireline/networking, medical, industrial, commercial, defence, security and aerospace.
“Working here really is working for a global company,” says Price, citing a recent three-month design project, working on a mini embedded controller for an Australian client. That involved a Plexus team at the Chicago manufacturing site, partnered with a Livingston design team, and drawing on the skills of a Plexus integration engineer from Penang, who worked for two weeks on the project in Livingston.
And as careers go, there is also considerable long-term potential in working for Plexus.
However, if you are fortunate enough to get a Plexus interview, do not presume Alba Campus in Scotland’s ‘high tech corridor’ is easy to locate using the Scottish Enterprise map.
Price laughs if you raise the issue of ‘mad mapping’, agrees that 30 minutes travel from Edinburgh to the Design Centre may well be a freak record, but offers invaluable advice. “Follow the well-signposted directions to the Kirkton campus and we’re easy to find,” he says.