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Asked by ryan1234 to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by carrietrewern.
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Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 14 Mar 2012:
Babcock as a group is large and probably will continue to grow and expand to other countries. If we look at the dockyard itself (which I understand much better) I think it will have to go for more commercial (not navy) work. This means we will have to become more efficient and much quicker at what we do. A standard refit for a navy vessel is between 6 months to a year. For a commercial vessel it is between 2 to 8 weeks! Because each day that the commercial vessel is in refit it is not earning money for the owner.
We are also becoming greener. Being more careful with the impact that we have on the environment.
I think in the future we will be more involved with renewables and possibly oil and gas work as well as shipbuilding.
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Ken Gibbs answered on 14 Mar 2012:
@ryan: As I don’t work for a company, it cannot change the world. However, where I have been able to train young people to take over what I have been doing, I have to believe that they will change the world for the better.
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Jed Ramsay answered on 14 Mar 2012:
At the moment, we are facing reductions in the size of our company as it is part of the government and they are cutting spending. So we’ll have less people and less money to do things.
But I think also things are changing around how we look after rivers. So now I work more with communities to try and get them to work on the rivers themselves, whether it is to reduce the risk of their houses flooding or to improve the river for wildlife. In the past this was all done entirely by government, whereas in the future I will need to get more people involved to help.
Comments
Bill commented on :
I think WSP is likely to become larger and even more multidisciplinary. At teh moment we are in the medium size (9000 people) but we have international competitors with 50,000 plus employees. This is all about being able to handle the very biggest infrastructure projects in the UK and the developing world. Its a very exciting time in engineering and all this activity leads to opportunity and raises the profile of our profession.