• Question: What has been the toughest challenge you've faced in your career so far?

    Asked by hannahgrimes to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by prostreet2.
    • Photo: Ken Gibbs

      Ken Gibbs answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      I think the toughest challenge I faced during my entire career was when I had to tell a senior colleague that he was corrupt and that I was unwilling to remain quiet about it. Suddenly, I had no friends because the senior colleague was very senior indeed and his friends didn’t want to believe what I was saying. It was even suggested that I should resign but they didn’t fire me because I had the evidence of the corruption. This marked me as a “trouble-maker”, so I was moved to where I was unlikely to cause further problems. It has had a significant effect on my career but for me, the challenge was to continue doing what I believe in, despite it. Incidentally, the corrupt official was forced out of the company some time later, but my reputation as a “trouble maker” didn’t change and eventually I left the company to become a self-employed disaster relief specialist.

      By the way, this challenge had absolutely nothing to do with engineering and is something that some people could face at some stage in their lives. Would you rise to this challenge and risk your position by speaking out, or would you simply pretend that it hadn’t happened ?

    • Photo: Jed Ramsay

      Jed Ramsay answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      @Ken – that is incredible answer. My father was forced to move jobs because he refused to take bribes in his job. I’d like to think I’d be able to have the same level of integrity.

      I’m not sure tough is the right word – but I recently got back from working for 3 months in Costa Rica and Nicaragua with Raleigh International. After working for years in the UK it was quite an eye-opener to do engineering in a place where sometimes there were no roads, no electricity, no running water and where I often slept in a hammock in a jungle!

Comments

  • Photo: hannahgrimes

    hannahgrimes commented on :

    @ all thanks for taking the time to answer my question 😀
    @ken that’s an amazing answer and i’d have to say i ( like Jed) would hope that i’d be able to rise to the challenge and speak out, but fortunately i haven’t had to face anything like this so far!

  • Photo: Ken

    Ken commented on :

    @Jed: Sleeping in a hammock ? What about the vampire bats ? And isn’t rabies endemic there, so wouldn’t there be a risk of rabies from the bats ?