Highflier – Cameron Sloman

Profile Cameron Sloman won the NxtGen award last autumn, after being in the asset management profession for just 12 months. Louise Parfitt catches up with him to find out what he has been up to, and how it feels to be acknowledged as one of the professions rising stars I was not expecting to win at all! I didnt know Id been nominated until the team told me that I had been shortlisted for the award, so it was pretty crazy when my name was called out Being in the running for the NxtGen award was a surprise in itself for Cameron Sloman, so being announced as the winner was quite a surreal moment. I was not expecting to win at all! I didnt know Id been nominated until the team told me that I had been shortlisted for the award, so it was pretty crazy when my name was called out, he says. But I am very grateful for the acknowledgement of what I have done so far and now I am looking to build on that momentum. Sloman is a very personable interviewee he is really friendly and easy to chat to, and is clearly driven and focused. His speech is peppered with a certain tentativeness and modesty, almost as if he is still finding his feet. After all, he graduated from university just four years ago and has been in the asset management sector for only a year so he is taking his first steps in the profession. But something tells me that, when he finds his stride, he really will be going places. IAMinterests On involvement I like challenging myself everything I do I want to do the best I can. I enjoy big-picture thinking and taking complex problems and trying to solve them. Theres a lot of satisfaction in overcoming obstacles and getting to the bottom of big problems. I have had that desire since I was young, especially when playing sports. I like almost everything to do with sports: playing, watching, talking about them! I played a lot of cricket growing up; I even managed to play for Scotland at the under-19 World Cup in 2016, which was probably the pinnacle of my sporting career. Now I play cricket on more of a social and hobby level, and I play a bit of golf. I enjoy most team sports though that camaraderie with friends and bit of good competitiveness is what I love. Ground control Sloman admits to being quite good at maths and physics during his school days, and those talents combined with a natural curiosity for how things work led him to study aeronautical and aerospace engineering all the way to Masters level at university. He then joined a graduate training programme at one of the UKs main airlines that included several placements across the business. One was engineering line maintenance, where the team make sure all our destinations are ready and fully equipped to maintain the aircraft for the return flight, and another was managing the daily flight-planning operation. The more I got into it, the better it was. It was like playing a game of chess across the world, Sloman says. It was a pretty crazy time too, because this was when COVID lockdowns really kicked in, so business as usual went out the window. But it was really interesting to be trying to manage a successful operation with the global landscape changing almost daily. There then followed a placement in digital innovation, considering what the next 10 to 15 years could look like for aviation in terms of technology, and using it to create a better experience for the customer and enhance safety and security. I loved the urgency and safety-critical element of the engineering and flight planning, but the strategy side of looking forwards and improving things was also really enjoyable, he says. It was towards the end of this placement that Sloman had his asset management lightbulb moment. I had met and spoken to people in the asset management field before, but when I discovered the IAM Anatomy, I realised that a lot of what asset management does within an asset-intensive organisation is to align all the interdependencies and the interfaces. I had been seeing how different departments tend to work in their silos and I started to get really interested in how you go about solving this. Reading through the IAM Anatomy really brought that to life. When I discovered the IAM Anatomy, I realised that a lot of what asset management does within an asset-intensive organisation is align all the interdependencies and the interfaces Taking the plunge On family My dad is Australian and my mum is Scottish. I grew up in Scotland, but I spent some time in my youth flying between the UK and Australia to visit my dads side of the family so thats where the curiosity around aviation started to come into it. I try to go [to Australia] whenever I can. Its always lovely to see all the family and its a great country. I have even managed to work with a client in Australia, so understanding what asset management looks like there and looking at the different maturities across different continents is very interesting. I love Australia because of the family connection, but I really enjoy visiting new places and experiencing what people are like in other parts of the world, as well as the cultures and the food: I love trying new food! I would really love to go to South Korea and Japan; they will be my next port of call from a travelling perspective. It was then that Sloman started to consider asset management as a career. When a job at AMCL came up just as his graduate training scheme was coming to an end, he applied and was successful. It was to be a huge leap into a whole new world. His first role was working with a UK water company that was facing a significant affordability challenge with its asset investment plan over the remaining three years of the current regulatory period. It needed to produce a more affordable plan while still maintaining its performance against various service delivery targets. Sloman had to develop an investment plan for the next three years, using a new asset investment planning and portfolio optimisation software product that the company had recently bought. Kristen Westall, a managing consultant at AMCL, who nominated Sloman for the NxtGen award, said on the submission: It was a tough ask of someone with limited asset management experience and no experience of working in the water sector. The project was run according to the agile project management framework, in which larger, more complicated chunks of work are broken down into smaller iterations and worked on for short, concentrated periods known as sprints. We had an intensive two or three months working with each department in the water company, Sloman explains. It was quite full on, and I had to get to grips with it all quite quickly. We were learning the asset management system that the company had procured as well, so it was very much hands-on training while trying to understand the complexities of the water companys data. IAMthe On involvement NxtGen award submission Kristen Westall, managing consultant at AMCL, nominated Sloman for the NxtGen award: Cameron came to AMCL in October 2021 from the aviation sector, where he had good operational experience, but relatively little strategic asset management knowledge and experience. Recruitment interviewers were impressed by the level of preparation and research he had conducted in advance of his interview. Cameron had performed in-depth research on the IAM 39 subjects and clearly had an excellent grasp of some of the finer technical details within The Anatomy document to the extent that he posed some rather challenging technical questions to his experienced interviewers! He clearly had a thirst for knowledge in the discipline of asset management, and quickly got to grips with the challenge [of the project he was working on] and the requirements of the daunting task ahead. In a very short period of time, a highly confident and articulate, but less experienced, new entrant to asset management was able to make a significant impact in one of the UKs largest water and wastewater services companies. He engaged confidently and with authority at multiple levels of the organisation, holding technical-level conversations with seasoned asset management professionals and senior-level executives. The outcome from the project that Cameron led has made a significant contribution to the asset investment planning capability of the organisation and yielded multi-million-pound cost savings. This has been quite an astonishing achievement for someone who is a new entrant to asset management. Camerons performance has been outstanding and he has demonstrated the highest possible potential as an asset management leader of the future. Up, up and away Another challenge was the change management side of implementation. With this particular asset management system, you gather all the data, decide on the various risk metrics and best performance targets, and it will spit out an answer that will address all the questions you set. But you need to be sure the questions are credible and doing what you actually want them to do, Sloman explains. It is very different from prioritising from the top down, where you start by looking at all the risk within your portfolio and pick away at which projects will get you to the right level of performance and risk within the organisation. So trying to take our team and the client on that journey, and get everyone aligned with what is happening and how you get to the answer, was quite challenging at the start. The more you see in action, the more you understand the solutions, and the easier it becomes for people to grasp how the answers are reached, so it got more straightforward as we went along. Sloman certainly rose to the challenge and excelled at what he was asked to do so much so that he started to take on more and more responsibility in the actual investment planning delivery of the project, as well as the project management. Westall said: Cameron quickly began to stand out as the leading consultant on the project, with experienced asset investment planners, with 20-plus years of experience, looking to him for guidance and advice on how to capture investment needs and the benefit of their investments for example, upgrading pumping station assets and quantifying risk reduction. The project was delivered on time and within budget, with a more affordable investment plan in place that also met service performance targets. In a few months, Cameron had been able to deliver a highly complex project involving multiple stakeholders and achieve something that others had been wrestling with for quite some time, said Westall. On the IAM and NxtGen I am member of IAM and NxtGen, and have taken part in the NxtGen webinars and conferences during this past year. That has been really interesting because, for most of my first year in asset management, I have really only worked on one big project, so seeing what peers and other companies are doing within the profession has been great. I find it interesting to see what I could do next, or what other sectors we could move into plus, you find out about all the good stuff that other people are doing. Flight path Sloman on being an IAM Excellence Awards finalist In a few months, Cameron had been able to deliver a highly complex project involving multiple stakeholders and achieve something that others had been wrestling with for quite some time Since the project came to an end in October 2022, Sloman has started to look at AMCLs other service offerings and work across different sectors, including rail and aviation. He has also completed the IAM Certificate. I want to keep on expanding my knowledge, he says. AMCL and the team here have been great at giving me the opportunity to learn and train, contextualise the experiences I had brought with me from the aviation sector, and begin to understand the asset management theory and processes behind that. Its been a bit of a whirlwind and an intense first year, but it has been good. Now I am just excited for the future and getting deeper into the asset management world, doing more with NxtGen, and seeing what asset management does across different sectors. He is especially interested in helping to create a more sustainable future and combating climate change by reducing emissions. Asset management has a massive part to play in this, and the IAM is very well placed to lead that. I am also fortunate to be at AMCL, where there is a really strong focus on sustainability and where I feel able to be at the forefront of this exciting transition.