Career Heroes - Patrick Mohan

Tell us more about you

I’m married with three children. I enjoy most sports and try to keep active. I’m originally from County Fermanagh and now live outside Newry.

What kind of work do you do?

I design heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), and plumbing systems. When you walk into a large building (generally anything other than a house), and the radiators are warm, there is water in the tap, and an extract fan turns on when you turn on the light in the bathroom, it's likely that the pipework, ductwork, and boiler have been designed by a HVAC engineer.

My job involves a lot of conversations and liaising with architects and construction professionals, such as electrical engineers - to see what size of power supply the boiler and pumps need to make them work, and quantity surveyors - to see how much the boiler will cost. I also use modelling software to build 3D virtual buildings that complete many of the calculations for me, such as AutoCAD and Revit drawing software. I'm involved in the job from the very beginning at the design stage, right through to it being installed and operational.

My job is largely computer-based work and is done from our office in Belfast. I’m currently in the office two days a week and work from home for three days.

There are about 450 people in the office, and most of them are construction professionals looking after all 2,000+ of the government’s buildings.

How did you become a Mechanical Engineer?

I enjoyed maths at school, and my dad was a farmer, so I had an interest in the environment. I had worked on construction sites growing up and wanted something that would combine these interests.

With maths being my favourite subject, engineering was an obvious choice, and Environmental Engineering was a course offered at Ulster University. I thought it would be the Environmental Engineering side that would interest me most, but very early on in the course, it was clear that the building services, mechanical in particular, was the avenue I would follow.

I graduated in 2002 and started my working career. I worked for a few private engineering practices in Dublin, Belfast, and Banbridge, before joining the Department of Finance in 2014.

If you could do-over, What would you do differently?

It’s always important to review your decisions and courses of action, but I’m not a believer in regretting them or wishing I had done things differently. I believe every experience (good or bad) educates and informs us for our future decisions.