What did the day-to-day experience look like?
My most recent RaaS was with a tech company, specifically on their data center design and construction side. So, my day-to-day activities were very unusual. I was working in a new department with them called Design for Safety, and within that role I helped be a part of the design team that designed their new data centers or elements that went into their data centers.
My day-to-day consisted of attending a lot of engineering meetings for various projects. Those engineering meetings were with internal design teams, as well as external engineering design companies. Essentially, I was the voice of safety. So, if they had safety questions, I was there to answer them, and they were there to answer my safety questions as well. We'd be discussing the design, I would see an issue, bring it up, and we could problem solve it at the time or address it at a different time when the company had time to do some calculations or do some design.
I also helped the contracting engineers fill out our risk assessments. They're sort of general EHS risk assessments like we think of them. But in this case, we wanted to involve the contractors and the engineering companies a lot in that process. I was there to help facilitate that and make sure that they filled in everywhere where they showed what control measures they had in place, how they were addressing each of these risks. Then part of that even involved linking the associated engineering drawing to show that that was part of the final design.
Finally, I would review the engineering drawing packages at each of the design phases. That's hundreds of pages of engineering designs through multiple disciplines looking for specific safety and environmental issues, as well as non-specific such as some maintenance activities that are going to need to be done. This includes asking does anything feel wrong? Does my safety experience show me that there's going to be a problem here?
What kind of tasks did you take on that you may not have gotten to be able to do without Raas?
My most recent RaaS gave me some really unique experiences that I wouldn't have gotten really anywhere else. Safety by Design is a newer concept within the EHS field, and it's trying to address safety and environmental risks before things are built or put into place. It’s trying to apply elimination, substitution, and engineering before anyone is put at risk. This helps us really tackle big changes. For example, trying to do things like move elements from the roof to the ground floor or to the ground so that we don't have to worry about work from heights at all. That kind of thing.
This is a sector that I always thought would be a good idea as someone with an engineering background, but it was really great getting to have this opportunity to work with this client and be so embedded and involved in this process and get to apply my engineering expertise. I don't think that I would've gotten this opportunity at this stage of my career without the RaaS program.
What's different about RaaS versus traditional consulting or traditional on-site EHS work outside of Antea Group?
For me, the RaaS roles have been very different than the day-to-day consulting experience. It's one that works a lot better with my workflow. It allows me to really get to know a client, get really involved with them and their process and their people, and build relationships there. That helps me adjust my work accordingly so I can really tailor what I'm doing to be the best fit for that client rather than kind of hopping around from client to client and doing all sorts of different activities.
It lets me really sink my teeth in and get good at what I'm doing. It also gives me the freedom to not worry about looking for work from week to week, which is something that I've struggled with in the past with consulting. It lets me free up and not worry about that and really just get good at what I'm doing and build those relationships that I think are really important.
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