Arup provides engineering, design, and consulting services for the built environment. A global leader in rail, Arup supports major railways with design, delivery, upgrades, operations, and maintenance.
Arup provides engineering, design, and consulting services for the built environment. A global leader in rail, Arup supports major railways with design, delivery, upgrades, operations, and maintenance.
Arup provides engineering, design, planning, project management and consulting services for all aspects of the built environment. Arup is a global leader in the rail sector working with major international railways at every stage – from design and delivery of new projects or large-scale enhancements, through to operations, maintenance and asset renewals.
Due to ongoing growth, Arup retained our services to recruit a Rail System Engineering Leader to head up their offering across UKIMEA.
The role leads a multi-disciplinary rail engineering system team consisting of Rolling stock, Signalling, Train Control and Traffic Management system, Railway Communications, Traction Power, and Permanent Way. Also working closely with Performance modelling (including timetable, network and power modelling), Asset Management and Building/Station teams.
This was an exciting opportunity that offered exposure to a wide range of work, finding solutions to complex issues that will make a real difference to the UK rail industry and overseas railway projects.
Reporting into the Global Rail System Engineering Leader, this person would need to have a depth of technical and managerial experience in the rail industry, with proven experience in multidisciplinary system design, railway network planning, standards management, technology evaluation, system engineering and system assurance for railway projects in a multi-disciplinary environment.
The focus for this search was to identify candidates with a breadth of experience across rail systems. Candidates with a focus on one particular area would be too specialised, we needed to uncover those who had experience with the integrated delivery of multiple elements.
To do this, we looked at other relevant engineering consultancies, rail systems suppliers and contractors. Due to the specialism of this role, it was necessary to conduct a global search to find leaders who had the required technical expertise. We focused on rail clients globally who had undergone major rail systems programmes or upgrades and homed in on the consultancies, contractors and suppliers working on those programmes.
We developed an extensive Boolean search string of rail systems terms to help us to zone in on the candidates with the required technical experience and combined this with a combination of searches across industry news outlets, professional institutions, conferences and events, associations we are members of and social media platforms.
Identified candidates were then approached using a variety of techniques including personalised outreach emails, LinkedIn InMails and messages, and reaching out to contacts within their networks. From there the best candidates were assessed using competency-based interviewing and a detailed analysis of their career ambitions, motivations and areas for consideration was provided to the client.
Aside from the highly specialised nature of this role, the main challenge we faced in the delivery of this assignment was that the salaries of those within suppliers and major projects were quite a bit higher than the client was able to pay. While this is a hurdle, it is one that many clients face. We overcame this by understanding and communicating the full rewards package rather than purely focusing on base salary. It was also critical that our consultants were able to highlight the benefits of working for such a unique and forward-thinking business, as this was a key selling point for the role.
From a longlist of 48 every candidate was spoken with to determine their interest. Newsom Consulting presented a shortlist of 4 candidates. The successful candidate joined from a rail systems supplier and had 28 years of experience across signalling, control systems, track and fleet.
