Graham Young has forty years experience in the field of design engineering, during which time he has worked in a variety of roles within a number of business sectors. He began his career delivering civil and structural design engineering projects for various companies and his experience included river and sea works; commercial and industrial construction; petro-chemical engineering; oil and gas engineering and off-shore engineering.

In 1986 he joined Atkins Oil and Gas Engineering as CAD Systems Manager. Having previously identified new technologies to replace repetitive and complex design processes, Graham applied the same approach in this role, moving the design process from the drawing board and complex mainframe based design programmes to cost effective and flexible PC based CAD and engineering design solutions. The revolution he led in design automation within the business began the shift of his career towards design and information systems.

Working for the Atkins Group over a period of twenty years, he gained experience in a number of roles and within various sectors, progressing to Head of Information Services for Atkins Rail Limited in 1996, Infrastructure Operations Manager in 2000 and Corporate Systems Director in 2003. Most recently he was promoted to Group Systems Director in 2006. His responsibilities extended across the Atkins Group and included devising, developing and supporting group wide enterprise systems, leading information systems strategy and delivery and information systems governance. His recent projects range from domain and network integration; redesign and replacement of websites and intranets; collaboration platforms and finance HR, payroll and training management systems, working in various countries across the Middle East, Asia, the USA and Europe.

He joined Foster + Partners in June 2007, as Senior Partner and Head of IT.