Introducing Molly, the newest member of the 4c team!

Molly graduated from Strathclyde University in 2022 with a Master’s in Product Design and Innovation. She then moved to London, where she worked in product development at GHD before joining 4c as a Junior Designer in November 2023.

Now that she has settled into her new role, we sat down with Molly to find out how she has found her first 8 months here.

What have you enjoyed about your time so far working at 4c?

So far, I’ve been involved in five different projects, and I’ve really enjoyed getting into the nitty gritty of everything. There’s mechanical elements and electrical elements, and although I’m not directly working on those areas, I get to help bring them all together and make them work together. And as difficult as it can be to get the product to work, once it does, you get that real sense of achievement.

It’s also been amazing being part of some of the larger projects, like one we’re currently doing with a local university. You are in meetings with 10-20 people that all work there, and only two years ago I was still at uni, so it just feels a bit insane that I’m actually getting to be a part of that!

A lot of my degree was during covid, so I was studying from home and not getting to go into university or use their workshops, and the main prototypes I made for fourth and most of fifth year I had to make at home. So, getting to come here with the workshop, it almost feels like I’m picking up from where I’d been at the end of third year of university in terms of hands-on skills and getting to really develop them. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and Tom [4c’s Workshop Manager] especially has shown me how to do things and given me the confidence to know that I can actually do them. It’s so much better to be hands on working – in fourth year at uni we had to use simulation software for learning about workshop machinery, and you would just get to ‘build’ things that way. So, it’s been really great having more hands-on workshop experience and getting to jump right back into that and develop all these skills. I feel like I’m really starting to make a lot of progress and do a lot of things that I felt I didn’t get to fully experience at the end of my uni course, because you couldn’t get into the building. So, I’m really, really enjoying that.

One of the other things I’ve enjoyed has been the chance to listen to and observe what other people around me are doing, because everyone who works here has so much more experience than me, and in very specific areas. So, being able to watch all of that and learn from it has been really interesting as well.

How does working at a design consultancy compare to working for a company that designs and manufactures products within one specific industry sector?

At my last job, you were assigned a project as lead, and you were the only product developer who worked on that product. At one point, I was leading six projects, but they were all quite similar, with a lot of the projects focusing on things like competitor research. Whereas here, everything you work on is just completely different. You can be doing competitor research for one project, but then you’re also doing CAD for another, making prototypes and meeting with clients. There are so many different things that you can do, and I’m really enjoying the scope of different projects that I’m getting to work on.

I also really like not knowing what project is coming next. At my last job, all the projects were projected in the calendar in advance, so you knew exactly what you’d be moving on to once you finished something. But working in a consultancy, you never know what projects are coming that far in advance and it’s kind of nice to not know.

Is there any advice you would give to someone just starting out on their design career who wants to work at a consultancy, or any skills that are particularly useful?

Being able to work independently and having the confidence to take the initiative have been really important skills that I’ve used consistently since joining 4c. There are so many different projects all happening at once that you really need to use your own initiative and believe that you do know what you’re doing. You don’t need someone to always tell you step-by-step what to do, you can have a bit of confidence and think, actually, I do know what needs to get done and just get on with it. I also think that listening to other people’s expertise and advice is really important for working well as a team in different projects.