Koen Gort is a Project Design Authority for our Central Safety System (CSS) work in the Netherlands. CSS uses digital signals to control railway security centrally from ProRail data centres. As a key aspect of ERTMS signalling, CSS helps to ensure safety and increase capacity on the network. It has recently been implemented across Holland.
With technology being Koen’s motivating interest, his project development work for signalling positions him to make an impact on railway safety and efficiency in his country.
In a recent interview, we asked him to provide some detail about his career. He gave us an insight into his skillset, the work opportunities available to him and the dynamic within his team.
Read this Q&A to hear more from Koen.
What has your career trajectory been at Hitachi Rail?
When my Hitachi Rail career began in 2022, I was a Product Support Engineer for GAST-ERTMS for ProRail in the Netherlands. In my new role, I am Deputy Project Design Authority for the Central Safety System project, also for ProRail.
Which skills that are essential to your role?
Within Hitachi the PDA role acts as a technical interface between the customer and the Hitachi organization. Personally, I think it’s an essential skill to be able to work with different people and understand the context they’re working in. For example, Project Management, Service Teams and Technical Experts all have their own skills and interests and it’s an interesting and fun challenge as a PDA to interact with a range of expertise.
Apart from having a solid technical background in electrical engineering and (embedded) software engineering, I think some important soft skills are also just part of my personality/character, such as:
Be eager to learn.
Don’t be afraid of pulling some responsibility towards you, even if you’re not sure about if you can do it. To me this is also the best way to learn anything: get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Keep calm in stressful situations.
How do you connect with the teams that you work with?
The CSS project is complex, partly because different components are developed in separate countries across Europe. It’s important that these components work together to form a (Central Safety) System. To reach that goal, regular communication and alignment between the countries is important and therefore colleagues/experts from mainly Germany, France, Spain and Romania meet with the project team from the Netherlands, mostly at the Hitachi office in Berlin.
Do you feel that your work will contribute to the decarbonisation of rail?
My humble contribution in the leap from traditional to more digitally focussed railway infrastructure in the Netherlands, will set the foundation for more innovation within the (sometimes conservative) railway industry.
Looking more into the future, I would really like to see that travelling by train becomes a reliable choice for travelling longer distances between countries. I think the implementation of ERTMS is a crucial step forward in reaching that goal.
How is the dynamic within your team?
We have a diverse project team in Utrecht with all kinds of expertise from around the world: risk-, contract and project management, technical, documentation, legal, configuration, collaboration and financial control.
Because there’s a lot going on, daily, there’s a huge benefit of sitting together in the same office close to the customer.
There is the benefit of having so many diverse cultural backgrounds working together on challenging pieces of the project, because everyone has their own view and experience. Therefore, you develop a certain sensibility for different ways of interpreting which forces you to think more critically about topics that are being discussed.
Do you have any advice for people looking for a career in engineering?
I’ve had different roles before I joined GTS, mainly in (embedded) software engineering in R&D departments. After a few years, I found out that wasn’t really what makes me happy, so I started to look around what else is out there. I’ve considered all kinds of different jobs, even far away from engineering but eventually ‘technology’ is still one of my main interests.
My take-away from that experience is that engineering is very wide and that there’s so much to discover in all kinds of different roles. Many of those roles you will only find without preplanning, so don’t be afraid to just start in engineering and you will eventually find out what fits you best. If you’re interested in engineering, there are many opportunities!
