Professional Engineering

On a warm spring day, without a cloud in the sky, Toulouse is a very pleasant place to be. Tom Williams certainly seems to think so. As he darts energetically around his spacious office, with its panoramic view across town, it is clear that here is a man doing a job he loves. And who could blame him? 

Williams is executive vice-president of programmes at Airbus, making him the highest-ranking British engineer in an organisation that employs more than 52,000 workers. Such a position brings immense responsibility: Williams is in charge of ensuring the profitability of Airbus’ civil and military programmes, including the A380 superjumbo and the A400M transport turboprop, while also leading product policy and overseeing the development of new products.

He is evidently a man at the top of his game. But it’s been a long journey from his upbringing in a tough part of Glasgow in the 1950s and his first job as an engineering apprentice. Williams isn’t embarrassed by his humble beginnings – far from it. He reckons that taking a vocational route into the aerospace industry gave him a solid, hands-on background that has enabled him to grow his career to the position where it is today.

“I was always interested in aerospace. I was the classic kid building Airfix models and hanging them from ceilings,” he recalls. “As I got a bit older I was always tinkering about with car engines. And those sorts of hobbies had an effect on the sorts of subjects that I excelled in at school.

“I grew up in a poor area in Glasgow – so it was quite normal to leave school at 16. At that time going down an apprenticeship route was very common. The majority of people went through that kind of system. The graduate route was far less common.”

Williams’ first career step was as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce Aero Engines in Glasgow which, in the late 1960s, employed more than 16,000 people in the city. He remembers feeling privileged to win a place on the company’s apprenticeship scheme, which was renowned for the quality of experience it offered. He was given the chance to work across the business, enjoying placements in the production departments, the toolrooms, the metrology laboratory, and inspection and test facilities, and he recalls it as providing a “fantastic training”.

But, even at that early stage, he was thinking about where he wanted to be in the future. After a couple of years’ intensive training as part of the apprenticeship programme, he was assigned a series of production jobs – one being in the blade shop which was characterised by very high-intensity short cycles. It made him realise that a lot of people in the company were doing repetitive jobs in a demanding environment. And it encouraged him to progress his career in other areas.

But he says that working in production departments within Rolls-Royce provided an invaluable insight into factory-floor culture. “You knew there was the official factory, and the unofficial factory, which was how the place actually operated,” he says. “Years later whenever anyone took me on a factory tour I would think to myself ‘Hmm, yes, that’s right but if I walk round the corner here what will I actually find?’. It made me a bit savvier with a bit more native knowledge in terms of how parts actually got made and how products got built.”

Towards the end of his apprenticeship, Rolls-Royce went through one of the darkest periods in its history. The complexity of the development and test process for the RB211 family of high-bypass turbofan engines meant that the programme went through several expensive design iterations, placing the company under intolerable financial pressure. On 4 February 1971 Rolls-Royce was placed into receivership and was subsequently nationalised by the then Conservative government of Edward Heath. Williams says that while it was undoubtedly a worrying time for the company, it proved to be an extremely enlightening period in his career. He got to see first hand the process of crisis management, preparing him for future career roles of his own. 

After rising through the ranks and taking increasingly senior roles in manufacturing within Rolls-Royce, the time came for Williams to move on. In 1992 he was appointed operations manager for Cummins Engines, looking after all manufacturing at the company’s 1,200-strong Scottish factory. Then in 1995 he became manufacturing and business group director for the sensors activity of Pilkington Optronics – a joint venture with Thomson CSF of France – with full responsibility for the integration of Thorn EMI Electro Optics into the business.