Four years ago, Salman Ejaz's working day revolved around ledgers and month-end reconciliations. Today, he's coordinating engineering teams, chasing production milestones and managing the logistics of specialist cable-handling equipment around the world. 

Salman is Manager of New Equipment Build at Subsea Cable Assets (SCA), a leading provider of subsea cable handling equipment and integrated systems for offshore and onshore energy and infrastructure projects worldwide. His route to this title didn't come from an engineering degree, it came from being given the chance to try.

Salman trained in Business & Finance Management in Pakistan, completing a bachelor's degree at Bahauddin Zakariya University and a master's at the National University of Sciences and Technology, both specialising in finance. After seven years working in accounts and finance roles in the United Arab Emirates, he joined SCA as Accounts Manager in December 2021, having already worked alongside the company's founder, helping to establish its Middle East operations.

His shift began almost by accident. In mid-2022, SCA had a project reaching its final mobilization phase in Dubai, and Salman put himself forward to help drive it over the line, a small step outside his role that opened a door he hadn't planned for.

What followed was on-the-job learning in its truest form, including sitting in on engineering meetings, asking questions and absorbing detail from colleagues who knew the equipment inside out: the cable carousels, loading towers, tensioners and deck spread systems that SCA engineers and fabricates for cable-laying vessels and barges. By the third quarter of 2023, Salman had so impressed his employer, they moved him into a full Project Manager position. As SCA's UAE site handles the bulk of the company's manufacturing, much of this role centred on production as well as project delivery, work that, by late last year, had grown into its own role - Manager, New Equipment Build.

Salman is candid about what made the transition possible. It wasn't a sudden aptitude for engineering, it was a working culture that gave him room to try things without being second-guessed. "Whatever I felt I could do, I always received a go-ahead," he says. "Not just the go-ahead, but full trust." This belief in his ability, he says, extended from the company's founders through the wider leadership team, and it's a big part of why he describes SCA less as an employer and more as a family.

His finance background hasn't gone to waste either. Project managers can typically be strong on delivery but less confident on the commercial side, where budgets can slip out of view. Salman's grounding in costing and risk means projects at SCA get built with a clear eye on what they should cost, not just what they should look like, whether that's a retrofit programme or one of the newbuild carousel systems the company has delivered in capacities of up to 12,000 tonnes.

Ask him what he's most proud of, and it's not the title he points to - it's SCA's growth. What started as just one carousel a year has grown into more than 25 carousels and many more auxiliary equipment in a single calendar year. That kind of progress in just five years is nothing short of unprecedented.

Salman has no plans to change direction again. He's staying in engineering, in the same field, doing the work he backed himself to learn. He says, “It's a career built on the kind of trust SCA gives its people with the room to grow into something new and long lasting.”