I have a master’s in aerospace engineering. I work at a marketing agency. If you’re wondering how those two sentences ended up in the same paragraph, you’re not the only one.
The plan
The plan was simple. Finish my MSc in London, get an engineering job in the UK, design things that fly.
I finished the MSc with a Distinction. The job part turned out to be much harder. I applied, and applied, and applied again. The UK engineering market is tough to break into, and at some point you have to decide whether to keep waiting for the perfect door or walk through the one that’s open.
I walked through the open one.
Going with the flow
The open door was Genesis, the luxury car brand, in London. I started in valeting and detailing. Yes, cleaning cars. Very carefully, because they were very expensive.
Then I moved up to Brand Ambassador at their showroom in a shopping centre. I looked after international and high-value customers, explained the cars without the hard sell, helped with brand activations and wrote newsletters. I also became the unofficial IT help desk for everyone around me, which nobody asked me to do and everybody was happy about. I was named Employee of the Quarter.
Somewhere in there, something shifted. I got genuinely interested in how brands work, how people decide to buy, and why some campaigns land while others vanish. Every industry, it turned out, has a huge amount to learn. And I like learning.
The engineering wasn’t wasted
This is the part I’m most sure of. My engineering training didn’t go to waste. It became my edge.
Engineering teaches you to look at something complicated and ask how it actually works. Not what the dashboard says, but where the numbers come from, what’s connected to what, and which part breaks first. Marketing has plenty of creative people. It has fewer people who want to open the bonnet.
So when a client’s ad results don’t add up, I don’t just adjust the budget. I check whether the tracking is even telling the truth. When a team is drowning in repetitive work, I don’t hire more hands. I build the automation. I think about problems differently to most of the people around me, and in every industry I’ve worked in, that has been an advantage rather than a quirk.
OnDigi
That’s where OnDigi Solutions comes in: a performance marketing and AI automation agency working with businesses across the UK, India, the Gulf and the US. Home care, private clinics, SaaS (Software as a Service), e-commerce, law firms, automotive, corporate gifting.
I built our website, set up the tracking and automation behind everything we do, run paid ads on Google and Meta, and write the media plans and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) audits clients use to make decisions. When we needed a task app, I built that too.
What I’d tell my graduation self
The path doesn’t have to be straight to go somewhere good. I walked into a car showroom as an aerospace engineer and walked out with an understanding of customers I’d never have learned in a lab. Then I brought both into marketing and automation.
Different industries, same habit. Learn the whole system, then build the bit that makes it work.