I spent over a decade being evaluated by other people's hiring standards before I ever had to set my own. As a Project Engineer, then a Cost/Design Engineer, then COO and Projects Director at Sykes Energiprojekts, I watched what separated engineers who became genuinely valuable on a project from those who simply held the right qualifications. Founding Awimax meant I finally had to decide, deliberately, what standard I'd hold the next generation of engineers to.

It is not, primarily, the credential.

Credentials are the floor, not the differentiator

To be clear: a sound engineering qualification matters, and I don't hire around it. But on infrastructure projects, the credential tells you someone has the foundational training. It doesn't tell you whether they'll be useful on an actual tank farm or depot project, where the gap between textbook knowledge and field judgment is where most of the real work happens.

I've worked with brilliantly credentialed engineers who struggled badly with the ambiguity of an actual construction site, and I've worked with less conventionally distinguished engineers who had an instinct for where a project was about to go wrong before it showed up on any report. The credential gets someone in the conversation. It doesn't predict which of those two people they'll be.

What I actually look for

  • Comfort with incomplete information. Field conditions on a depot or tank farm rarely match the drawings exactly. Engineers who need everything fully specified before they can act struggle in delivery roles. The ones who can reason carefully from incomplete information, without becoming reckless about it, are the ones I trust on site.
  • Willingness to flag problems early, even unwelcome ones. The most expensive mistakes on any project I've delivered came from issues that someone noticed early and didn't escalate, hoping it would resolve itself. I'd rather hire someone who raises an inconvenient flag too early than someone who stays quiet to avoid being the bearer of bad news.
  • Genuine curiosity about why something works, not just that it works. Engineers who ask why a specification exists, not just what it requires, tend to make better judgment calls when they encounter a situation the specification didn't anticipate.
  • Respect for the trades and the people actually doing the physical work. Some of the best technical insight I've gained on a project came from welders and site technicians, not from other engineers. The people who dismiss that as beneath their attention miss a lot of what a project is actually telling them.
"The credential tells me someone can pass an exam. It doesn't tell me whether they'll notice the thing that's about to go wrong before it does."

Why this matters more in a company you're building yourself

As a projects director working within someone else's company, a hiring mistake was a problem to manage. As a founder, it's a problem you can't easily delegate away — the quality of the people Awimax brings onto a project reflects directly on the company's name, and by extension, on a decade of credibility I've spent building one project at a time.

That's why, even as Awimax has grown into a group spanning engineering services, energy, and gas, I've stayed closely involved in how we evaluate engineering talent. The standard I learned to value over a decade in the field — judgment over credentials, honesty over comfort — is the same one I'm building the company's hiring around now.