A Career as a Performance Engineer

 


Oli has been working in the built environment for around five years. He started straight after university and is currently working towards chartership with CIBSE.

Now working as a Performance Engineer at Hoare Lea, Oli is focused on reducing carbon emissions by improving the performance of homes, offices, and educational buildings throughout the UK. Oli is also the committee secretary for the CIBSE Young Energy Performance Group (YEPG), supporting the ongoing events and the organisation of the group.


Who are Performance Engineers?

Performance engineering is an emerging role in the built environment that exists to close the commonly talked about “performance gap”. A Performance Engineers’ job is to ensure that a building is performing as well in reality as it was designed to. How well a building is designed to perform can be measured in many ways. It can be in terms of energy consumption, thermal comfort, lighting levels – whatever is important to the users of the building.

Tell us about your typical tasks.

Performance engineering is a data driven role that is all about solving problems. Data-driven means that all the recommendations we make to our clients are based on actual data demonstrating how the building is performing. As such, a large part of my role is spent delving into this building data to identify the trends between energy consumption and building operation and finding opportunities to improve the building’s performance.

Once we have identified some opportunities, we then work with the client and their contractors to get those opportunities implemented and start improving the performance of the building! It is great to be able to see our ideas implemented and the impact that they have.

What advice would you give to those interested in the industry?

Construction and the wider built environment are such vast industries that there really is something for everyone. There are also lots of companies offering internships to give you a flavour of the work they’re involved with, which are great opportunities to find out which roles are a good fit for you.


What brought you into performance engineering?


I got involved in performance engineering because I wanted a role that plays a part in reducing the carbon emissions of the built environment. There are now a huge number of companies that have signed up to the climate emergency declaration and so minimising the impact we have on our environment as building designers really is at the forefront of everyone’s mind in the industry.


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