Life at OCA
Nick Wordsworth
CEO
What did you do before working at OCA?
I’m a Chartered Civil Engineer with a background in port and harbour engineering. I started my career as a civil engineering consultant back in the last Millennium (just). The first three years were spent designing and planning a diverse range of major projects, having a great time travelling around the UK and Ireland, and getting my first taste of offshore work (geotechnical investigation for a sewage outfall in Scotland!).
Over the next 6 years I achieved some of my personal key career aims of achieving a Masters’ degree, getting professionally qualified, and eventually, making the switch from the ports and harbours sector to offshore wind. Working for another consulting firm, DNVGL (then Noble Denton), I really enjoyed the variety of work I was involved with, quickly cycling through offshore SI campaigns, decommissioning and repair works and planning major new projects in the UK and Germany.
I joined Orsted (then DONG Energy) in 2012 to get a more detailed understanding of the construction process, leading the installation of foundations for a UK project. However, after working on only one project for 2 years and having started on the next in a very similar role, I was missing the variety of challenges that consulting offered. So I started OCA.
What is it like to work at OCA?
It’s great to work at OCA (although I’m biased obviously)!. We have a variety of projects and we are really focused on helping our team learn from each other while they work. Most of our staff have worked on at least three or four different projects within the first 6 months of joining, and that means we are constantly sharing ideas and finding out new approaches to the challenges we face.
I like to think that OCA’s work ethos is strongly driven by our shared values – we want to increase the expertise of our team, we want them to able to deliver quality work, we want them to feel creative to make us better and we want them to work with a community focus.
All of that means we are constantly communicating and supporting each other to grow and deliver great outcomes for our clients. Day to day, I still spend most of my time working on client projects, because that’s what I enjoy.
With my CEO hat on, I do also have to do some management stuff – signing documents and supporting the OCA management team to ensure we remain the fun and stable workplace that our employees expect and deserve.
Why did you choose to work in Offshore Wind?
Working in offshore wind means working to design and build some of the biggest, most complex construction projects ever constructed, in a highly dynamic and challenging environment.
It’s a new industry, constantly evolving, full of innovation and challenges that require creativity and new technology to overcome and unless you don’t want to be, you’ll be employed in it for the next 40 years, with the opportunity to travel and work globally.
You also get to tell your kids and anyone else who asks that your job is helping to save the planet and it’s all true. Why not work in offshore wind?
