The company

Argo Engineering Solutions, founded in 2016 by Simon Walley and based at Hythe Marina, Southampton, is a 12-strong team specialising in lightweight structures across composites, aluminium and high-strength steels. The company’s work spans five pillars of expertise: advanced structures, prototyping, high-speed light craft, windships, and hovercraft and air cushion vehicles.

The engineer

Emma Shepherd is one of Argo’s five engineering consultants, and her career illustrates how the company develops its people. Having completed an MEng (Hons) in Marine Technology with Small Craft Technology at Newcastle University in 2020, she had already spent two summers with Argo as an intern before joining as a design engineer, progressing to engineering consultant in September 2024.

Her technical experience encompasses naval architecture and hydrodynamics on concept projects, preliminary design of RIBs to various rule sets, structural assessment against ISO standards, stability assessments, lifting calculations, weight-critical studies and hoverbarge stability feasibility work. She has developed proficiency in finite element analysis using Strand7 and is practised in hand calculations for hull structures across monohull and catamaran configurations.

Her portfolio reflects the kind of multidisciplinary, hands-on engineering career that professional chartership is designed to recognise.

She says: “I am looking for an experienced RINA member who has worked on a range of projects and understands the chartership process – someone who could help me review my application and offer guidance and feedback on what I have prepared so far.”

What is needed

Shepherd is now preparing her chartership application, and it is here that a gap has emerged, not in her experience, but in the support available to her.

Argo has not previously navigated the RINA chartership process, and there are open questions around how to collate experience and present it in the format RINA requires. What is needed is someone who understands the process from the inside: how evidence should be structured, what level of detail is expected and how a candidate’s career narrative should be framed to meet the Institution’s standards.

What Argo can offer

Mentoring is already part of the fabric of how Argo operates. The four most senior staff, with between 15 and 30 years of experience each, provide active technical guidance to junior engineers. With six years post-graduation experience herself, Shepherd is well placed to support the four recently graduated engineers who have joined the company in the past three years.

Argo also offers work experience and internships to undergraduates, providing experience that contributes directly to logbook objectives. Once Shepherd achieves chartership, she will be glad to act as an external mentor to candidates at other organisations.

A mentor who knows the RINA process and can help Shepherd present an already strong engineering career in the right way would benefit not just one engineer, but an entire company’s approach to professional development for years to come.

Get in touch: info@argo-engineering.co.uk

This article appeared in Members, TNA May/June 2026.