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What would you do if you were starting out on a career now? Or if you're starting out soon, what will you do?

The question was put to me by a colleague recently, anxious about the school subject choices of his teenage son and daughter.

It's not just the prospect of paying big bucks for a university education, which has fast become a given in Scotland as well as England.

It's that looming public sector job cuts make even secure lines of work seem more insecure. There's a sense of the economic ground shifting under our feet.

I had little hesitation an finding answer for my colleague. And it was less than half a joke when I suggested that if you want a secure future, learn about mining, go to Australia and start selling raw materials to the Chinese. And be sure to wear plenty of sunblock.

Clydeside of yesteryear

But there's a shortcut, letting you stay close to home.

Sell mining equipment to the Australian miners and the Chinese nuclear engineers.

That's what Weir Group is doing rather successfully.

Its management have taken an old company, founded in 1875 - one for which my grandfather, Robert Forbes, worked on the Cathcart shop floor, as it happens, retiring just over 50 years ago.

And it's gone on to break the rules of industrial globalisation.

The argument's particularly well made in the Financial Times this week, as London wakes up to the fact that this unexpected newcomer to the FTSE 100 looks strangely like a throwback to Clydeside of yesteryear.

Weir made its money selling pumps for the Clyde's ships.

Tony Jackson's observation in the FT is that pumps were there at the outset of Britain's industrial revolution, and should therefore be expected to be the first to lose out to innovative, cheaper, later developers.

But Weir's confounded such expectations.

It's battled through some corporate scrapes and near-death experiences to build that engineering excellence into a global presence, now providing specialist pumps and valves in mining, power stations and oil and gas.

Loose reins

And as with Scotland's other engineering success stories, it's done so by overseas acquisition, letting the reins sufficiently loose on 40 businesses, operating from multiple centres.

Weir recently opened a servicing centre in Siberia.

It's got 1,000 employees in South America, as many in Africa and again in Australia.

The workforce is now more than 10,000 and growing on the back of completing the purchase of a valves business in India last month.

You can learn more about it from the chief executive himself, Keith Cochrane, who has made a career at top levels in Stagecoach and Scottish Power, and he's done so, unusually, without having to leave Scotland.

He's interviewed on Radio Scotland's The Business this Sunday at 10am, and available for a week after that on iplayer and as a podcast.