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.


CIBSE Membership is free for full-time students and heavily discounted for those in part-time education

Join Now

  • Unlimited downloads of guides, research papers and publications from the Knowledge Portal
  • A monthly digital subscription to the CIBSE Journal
  • Access to on-demand learning content including webinars, video presentations and live events. 
  • Be supported in your early career by the CIBSE Young Engineers Network (YEN) 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Face-to-face or remote training?

Image
With the return to the office and the ‘new normal’ of hybrid working, we have seen the reintroduction of face-to-face training. However remote courses, which enable people to be trained virtually have remained popular, with people expecting both types of training to be available. For corporate training there is no extra travelling required by employees, for either face-to-face or remote training. You can choose your own date and time, and the content can be delivered in either format. So, what are the differences between the two learning options? Preference. The main criterium for choosing face-to-face or remote training is based on people’s concentration level, preferred style of interaction, the learning environment and their digital knowledge, or simply, some people just prefer one learning format to another. Focus. People’s attention span varies. Some people concentrate better when they have someone speaking physically in front of them, whilst others find it easier to follow if t
Read more

Embodied Carbon Award: A step towards net zero carbon

Image
Now in its 15th year, the CIBSE Building Performance Awards is the only awards scheme to celebrate the measured performance of projects and products in use while celebrating the engineering consultancies and manufacturers that are contributing to a low carbon future. Michael Lonsdale Group won the Embodied Carbon Award for its pioneering work with suppliers to create a database of low embodied carbon products that enable it to recommend low carbon building services systems to its clients.  We heard from Michael Lonsdale Group about what this award means to them: Caption: Senior Environmental & Sustainability Manager, Joanna Constandis (right) and Engineering Services Director, Paul Cornwell (left) collecting the Embodied Carbon Award at BPA2022. Industries and businesses throughout the globe have begun to show ownership of their environmental agendas. The significance of the topic has been realised, identifying the need for progress towards Net Zero Carbon. So, when Dame Jo da Silv
Read more

CIBSE Role Models - Emeka Efe Osaji

Image
The CIBSE Role Model series is intended to shine a spotlight on members of our building services community from under-represented groups and backgrounds to inspire and promote diversity amongst future engineers.  As part of our Role Model series this month, we speak to Emeka Efe Osaji a Teaching Fellow in Architectural Technology at the University of Salford, and Treasurer of the CIBSE Energy Performance Group. My name is Emeka Efe Osaji. Personally, I am a son, brother, husband, dad, uncle, nephew, cousin, in-law, and friend. Professionally, I am a Teaching Fellow in Architectural Technology at the University of Salford. I am lucky to be a 2nd-generation Academic, Researcher and Consultant. The steps taken by my parents and others have helped provide me with the right support network and prerequisite direction and clarity. I have kindly received recognition for my humble contributions, including in areas, such as: (1) Energy Certification Compliance Knowledge Transfer; (2) Teaching Ex
Read more