How to become an engineer: Josh's story

Josh:

Hi, I'm Josh. I'm 24 years old and I'm an engineer. I'm the CEO of RPD International. We help companies understand what the future of the world might be. They come to us with these ideas, crazy designs and projects and contraptions and we'll help them design those, do the engineering and then manufacture them and ship them all round the world.

My first introduction to engineering was when I was 10, 11 years old, watching Robot Wars on TV and I was just fascinated by the engineering behind it. So I spent a long time learning how to do the engineering behind robotics, trying to design more and more interesting projects, learning the maths behind everything I was doing. And I got to the point where I just couldn't produce this stuff with Sellotape or maybe a drill that I had at home. So I went round the UK, talking to factories, saying here are the drawings, here's everything I want to make and asking them with the money I had from a paper round, if they could produce this stuff. Their whole response was, go to China, you can't afford to produce anything here.

I was actually able to go and Google Chinese factories and find people from the UK, from Europe, from America who moved out to China who are now running factories out there. I was 13 years old sending all of my pocket money out to China to make more and more interesting things to take to these robotic events. And meeting all of these people with important roles around the engineering industry and they started to say: can you manufacture this piece for me? This very quickly became, introduced to the next person, and the next person and all of this work is international, it's all remote through phone calls and emails and nobody asked the question "how old is our supply chain consultant?"

Whilst I spent all this time working with companies and working in China, I was still doing my GCSEs. I spent 20 hours a day, working. I'd go to school, be in my Maths lesson or wherever I needed to be, then I'd go home. I'd sleep a few hours. I'd get up at 3 am to be on the phone in China. So it was during my A-levels, suddenly they realised I was still only 17, 18 years old and wasn't actually old enough to be qualified to do this work. Very quickly, I was fired and that was the end of my first introduction to Engineering.

What I really wanted to do was get back into that world of people and process, and how you really make something. I just couldn't see myself going to university to study the physics behind it, so I incorporated the business. Things became more and more interesting. Half of my time is with clients looking at what might be interesting, what's the future of consumers and products? The other half of my time, I'm flying around the world, working with manufacturers, walking factory floors, looking at how these things are produced, what kind of technologies are coming out there, and how we can put these things together.

The last seven years, we've been creating more and more interesting projects, shipped to millions of people around the world. For me the future really is about having fun. It's about creating this business that has a huge impact on the world.