Route Engineer Stuart Wilson celebrates 25 year work anniversary
28 August 2025
What an amazing milestone for Stuart, us as a team here at Global Marine Group and OceanIQ as well as for our customer who benefit from Stuart’s vast experience, knowledge and passion for his role.
Hear more from Stuart when we caught up with him about his 25 year work anniversary.
- What have been your roles over the 25 years
I started work as a Charting Officer working on geographic cable installation and maintenance records and using them to create and update charts. That was a really important foundation for me where I learnt so much about how the industry worked from the information which came back from all the offshore operations.
I moved on to a Project Manager role, managing a cable installation in Russia between Sovetskaya Gavan and Sakhalin Island which we did with SBSS. I learnt from an excellent project management team at that time including Sandra Hayes, Paul Deslandes and Andy Lloyd.
A role then came up managing all of our maintenance operations in the Atlantic and Pacific which I took on and I did that for around 2 and a half years. At the time we were also doing a significant amount of outside work in maintenance, so I got to manage a few short but very interesting power cable and government projects.
In 2009 the Route Engineering and Survey Manager role became vacant and I moved into what has been the most rewarding position I’ve had, and one that I still love, researching and designing new cable routes for telecoms and power projects and managing the marine survey works that support these projects.
How has the business changed in that time?
The business has changed dramatically over 25 years. When I joined in 2000 it was at the height of the dot-com bubble, with a company turnover in excess of £500m and 27 ships working for us. Global Crossing had just bought us and money seemed flow like seawater at that point. But the tide soon turned and the industry crashed like a huge wave less than 2 years later. Several redundancy rounds followed but I was one of the lucky ones to keep my job.
As things slowly improved in the industry new opportunities came along and I changed roles a few times, each time gaining more knowledge and responsibility. We moved into the power cable market which gave me first hand experience of planning windfarm export and inter array cables and interconnectors. We started to design cables for the oil and gas industry connecting platforms and we looked at how we could reuse older cable system and re-purpose them to extend their design life.
- 25 years is no mean feat – what has kept you happy and engaged here at OceanIQ & Global Marine Group?
That’s easy – the huge variety of projects we have delivered and the people I work with. It’s a fantastic combination, working on a diverse set of projects across literally the whole globe with some extremely knowledgeable and interesting individuals. Its taken me to far flung landing points in places like Necker Island and East Timor, to survey mob meetings in Hull, and in more recent years the chance to speak on important industry topics at conferences.
- You must have so many career highlights?
I was proud to design and engineer the cable routing for Hibernia Express working with Alasdair Wilkie to create the pioneering (and still the world’s lowest latency) transatlantic cable route.
Delivering cable routing for some of the earliest offshore windfarms in the UK, helping in some small way to lower the UK’s carbon production. Working on the following windfarms – Kentish Flats, Sheringham Shoal, Gwynt Y Mor and London Array (and have since completed many more).
Undertaking site visits to the Inner Hebrides using just my bicycle (could they be the greenest site visits ever undertaken?) and standing on pristine Scottish beaches in stunning scenery.
Visting Svalbard in the Arctic circle for a survey mobilisation and experiencing 24 hr daylight, whilst having to keep a rifle with us at all times when outside the capital of Longyearbyen, in case of polar bear attack.
Helping to train and develop a significant amount of people who have either moved on to be successful in other roles or remain in my team to this day.
What’s the secret to your successes here?
Work hard and take every opportunity you get to learn and understand the submarine cable industry. We are not a big enough to support dedicated tertiary education programmes, so people joining tend to do so from a variety of other industries using an associated skillset. To understand and succeed you have to immerse yourself. Its so great to see some of the recent ‘Next Gen’ initiatives as these will give many newcomers ways of gaining experience that took me years to achieve.
Through the knowledge gained, learn to determine the key factors that will ensure the success of a cable project, particularly in my role – the key risks to the cable and how to mitigate them.
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