Engineering as a second career
Discouraged from engineering when choosing her career, Kate lectured in journalism before a career change into renewables and now promotes engineering as a career option in schools.
Girls don’t do engineering.
Considering her choice of career as she was leaving school, Kate’s teacher told her, “Girls don’t do engineering. Boys do.” Without any discernible role models of female engineers, this was enough to put Kate off engineering as a career option.
Taking instead a different path, Kate went down the Arts route, studying English and Management and going on to lecture in Journalism and Communication for over a decade:
“If you ever need to know the differences and similarities between the journalism and fiction of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, then I am your engineer!”
Time for a change
After getting married, having children and moving cities, Kate felt that a change was on the horizon, and sitting in the garden with her husband, he suggested the possibility of engineering.
Kate decided to give it a go: “It was just one course to start with, just to see what I thought about it – and I really enjoyed it, and then I did another course. I remember when I got my results through that I had a degree in engineering – I was so excited, but it was almost a bit of a surprise because it had taken me eight years to get there with the Open University courses.”
A new career as an engineer
“It was very exciting to actually have moved from being a lecturer to being an engineer.”
Now with a BEng in Renewable Energy, Kate started a Graduate Programme at SSE and has been given the chance to complete different placements within the business including Strategy, Electric Vehicle (EV) charging and Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) charging.
Having made the leap into a new career, Kate felt the biggest challenge was overcoming imposter syndrome: “I was a lot older than many of the other graduates and I wondered if I had made the right decisions switching careers. However, I have been so lucky to have a really supportive manager and mentor. They helped me with accepting that it was a steep learning curve and I didn't need to know everything right away and I was doing a good job.”
More than that, Kate has been recognised time and again for her work in promoting STEM activities, being the recipient of the internal SSE ‘Engineering Professional Development Forum’s Special Recognition Award’ as well as the ‘Community at Heart’ award.
Making engineering a viable career choice
“For me, with STEM, the most important thing is just for children to see engineering and STEM jobs as an option.”
Last year Kate spent over 100 hours volunteering her time in schools and at STEM events, from judging competitions, writing blogs, hosting mock interviews and running activity sessions.
With two daughters, Kate is now the female engineer to turn to that she never had growing up: “they don’t have to become engineers, but what I want is for them to know that it is an option for them and that if they want to, they can certainly go and they would be great at it.”