For Lieutenant James Sullivan, 'blowing up' is just a part of the job description – whether he’s at his desk or on the range.

As a media planner in the civilian world, Lieutenant Sullivan spends his week 'blowing up' the internet with viral campaigns. At weekends, his focus shifts to demolition as a reservist engineer with the Australian Defence Force.

“I love the juxtaposition,” Lieutenant Sullivan said. 

“My day job is a lot of sitting behind a desk looking at spreadsheets. Then I get to spend the weekend running demolition serials.

“It’s a great sell: ‘I know you’re working on a presentation, but do you want to come blow a safe open on the weekend?’”

While advertising and engineering may seem like polar opposites, Lieutenant Sullivan believes they share a common thread: creativity.

“One of the beauties of the engineers is their ingenuity; basically being able to tackle any problem as you need,” he said.

“Obviously there’s doctrinal ways to do everything, but you might not always have the stores available to you, so you have to be able to think on your feet, and that’s where engineers stand out.

“I like being an engineer due to the variety of taskings that we can have. We can be search experts, we can be demolitions experts, we can be used to breach obstacles, create obstacles. We really get to be infantry with a few more tricks up our sleeves.”

Lieutenant Sullivan recently completed back-to-back explosives user and explosives supervisor courses at the School of Military Engineering at Holsworthy to maintain the safety standards required for demolition activities.

“Doing the courses together allowed me to put the skills into immediate practice,” he said.

“It’s really important because it confirms our ability to run these serials safely and make sure our sappers are retaining currency and we know they’re doing it properly and they’re doing it safely.”

Find out more about becoming an engineer with the Australian Army here: https://www.adfcareers.gov.au/jobs/army/engineering-officer