I spent four years studying aeronautical engineering. Fluid dynamics, aircraft structures, propulsion systems, avionics. By the time I graduated, I could tell you how a wing generates lift, how a turbofan engine stages its compression, and what happens to aluminium alloys under sustained fatigue loads.
What I couldn't tell you — and what nobody had really taught me — was how an aircraft goes from a design on paper to a physical object in service, how the parts that keep it flying get sourced and delivered, and what happens when something breaks at 2 AM on the other side of the world. That turned out to be the part that fascinated me most.
The realisation that changed my direction
It happened during my MBA in Aviation Management. We did a case study on an AOG event — a single stuck actuator grounding a widebody aircraft for 18 hours at an outstations airport. The case walked through the engineering problem, the financial impact, and the operational scramble to resolve it. I kept finding myself more interested in the scramble than the engineering.
I didn't leave engineering because I found it uninteresting. I left because I found supply chain more interesting — particularly in aviation, where the stakes are higher than almost anywhere else and the operational complexity is enormous. Engineering tells you why things work. Supply chain determines whether they work in the real world.
The path that followed
What engineering gave me that supply chain didn't teach
Engineers are trained to decompose complex systems. To identify what’s actually variable and what’s constrained. To ask ‘what will make this fail?’ before asking ‘how do I make this work?’ That diagnostic instinct — always looking for the load-bearing assumption, the hidden dependency, the failure mode — translates remarkably well to supply chain and product work.
What I'd tell someone considering a similar move
- ›Domain depth matters more than the domain itself — your existing expertise is rarer than you think
- ›The MSc was worth it, but the lasting value was learning to think quantitatively about operations problems
- ›Don't wait until your CV looks perfect — the gap between 'not formally trained' and 'not qualified' is often much smaller than it seems
The best supply chain professionals I've met aren't the ones who followed the most linear path. They're the ones who brought something unexpected to the discipline and used it to see problems differently. The pivot wasn't a detour. It was the qualification.