Telecoms engineer, music producer share how they forged careers at ST event

Most people expect professional networking to happen at conferences or on LinkedIn, but for Mr Noel Png, 31, it was a bartending job that unexpectedly opened doors to a career in the satellite industry.

- Megan Wee

It all began in 2016, when Mr Png—then a mechanical engineering student at the National University of Singapore who was working part-time in a bar—struck up a conversation with a group of visitors who were in town for a business convention. That led to a local internship with Thales Alenia Space, a France-headquartered company that provides satellite-based systems for telecommunications and navigation, among others.

In 2020, he left Singapore for the UK to pursue a master's degree in engineering before going on to work on satellite and defence projects across Europe.

Mr Png, who returned to Singapore in 2024 and is now a telecommunications system engineer at ST Engineering, shared his story during a live recording of Headstart on Record on June 3. He was joined by senior career coach Parameswari Seenivasan from Workforce Singapore (WSG), with the session moderated by The Straits Times' manpower correspondent Tay Hong Yi.