Glenn Platt CPEng, Manager Infrastructure, Planning and Development, Unity Water
An openness to experience and a passion for his work have taken Glenn Platt to conferences and consultancies around the world.
Unitywater Manager of Infrastructure, Planning and Development Glenn Platt has seen his civil engineering work take him from small-scale projects on regional councils to presenting at international conferences. Throughout, what has kept him engaged is a sense of enthusiasm for new things.
“It might be just a local landfill or a local water and sewage job or going to a local school and talking about water minimisation, to really going into an international scene and presenting all around the Middle East,” he tells create.
“I presented in Korea on waste management to a mechanical society in Seoul. That was an enjoyable experience.”
Platt says he embraces the opportunity to travel the world and speak on topics about which he is passionate.
“I enjoy spreading that message and I enjoy conversing with all sorts of people, whether it’s clients or other colleagues or counterparts or different people around the world,” he says.
“I have confidence in talking about the things that I’m passionate about. The hardest thing I’ve ever faced is having to give a presentation on something that I wasn’t quite passionate about, but someone else wrote.”
Glenn’s three tips for success
- You learn so much from other people looking at body language and how people react to different situations.
- Once you’ve finished your degree, go out and get a couple of years’ experience before you consider doing further study.
- Be patient. Don’t rush out trying to be the best in the world from day one.
This openness to new experiences has also helped him adapt to working in other cultures, he says, such as when he was Managing Director for Infrastructure at KEO International Consultants in the United Arab Emirates.
“I’m quite patient in understanding the different cultures that we need to deal with,” he says. “I think that’s why we were quite successful in the Middle East, because we weren’t afraid to try new things, and I’d like to think that it was because I gave my staff the opportunity to do that.”
In his current role at Unitywater, he appreciates the opportunity to make a serious commitment to sustainability.
“That was focused on how could we generate our own energy within [a sewage treatment] plant and not have that reliance on the grid,” he says. “That morphed into a much broader area, being our sustainability goals — we’d set ourselves some pretty lofty goals.”
Platt is a Chartered engineer, an accreditation he pursued when he returned to Australia in 2018.
“It dawned on me then that I wanted to almost give back or become more involved in the engineering community in Australia,” he says.
“When I came back to home, I thought, you know what? I need to do more and to become more involved with the engineering fraternity.”
He appreciates the recognition Chartership affords him — not just from others, but also from himself.
“You’re not just an engineer; you’re recognised as one of the top in your field,” he says.
“Sometimes you look at the certificates you’ve got — those university certificates — but you don’t take enough notice of your own recognition. Recognising yourself and saying, ‘You know what? I’ve done a good job.’”
To find out more about Chartered engineer status, head over to Engineers Australia.
For more of the latest engineering news sign up to create’s weekly newsletter.
