CAREERS IN INNOVATIVE ENGINEERING

Suzy Lynch: We’re in the East of England which is the ideas county. Who realises the ideas? It’s the engineers. It’s the design engineers, the development engineers, along with the scientists. Engineering is, I think, quite difficult to put your finger on. We all have our version of what an engineer is and it’s not as easy to define as a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant because it’s such a huge range. Actually I did a general engineering degree because I didn’t know which part of engineering I wanted to go into. And actually, from, you know, electronics engineering through to civil engineering and building engineering through to manufacturing engineering and mechanical, which is obviously my part of engineering, it’s just so, such a huge range that it’s difficult to know exactly what it is and therefore it’s difficult to aspire to being an engineer. But when I was at school I went on a women in engineering course for a week, which was residential, up at Newcastle university, which gave me a look at the whole bridge building, we went to British Gas and looked around their research and development centre, we did some electronics engineering, we did all sorts of bits and pieces which made me realise yes, this is what I wanted to do, I was always very clearly a scientist but didn’t really like the idea of pure science, it was actually the application of it that excited me so I was lucky that I did fall onto the course and realise that actually engineering is where my heart is. 

Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I’m Cobi Smith. That was Suzy Lynch, a manufacturing consultant, introducing our episode on enterprise in engineering. As Suzy mentioned, engineering can be a bit hard to define.

Anne Swietlik: There’s a muddle in what engineering is per se. There’s not, there’s no clarity about how diverse those roles could be. I don’t think there is understanding in schools and I think that although schools are working hard and they’re making certain that their teachers are more aware of the opportunities outside. If you’re teaching physics or you’re teaching maths and you have no idea where that’s going to be applied, I cannot for the life of me see that you’re going to get interested people who, women or boys or girls who are actually interested in doing that because they can see where they can go with that subject. And that’s one of the things that as a company we’re working very hard in doing.

Cobi Smith: That was Anne Swietlik, who manages an engineering and manufacturing company. Here’s innovative engineer Anne Miller.

Anne Miller: I mean the problem is in English the word engineer encompasses everything from your consultant who jetsets around the world with their passport solving some of the worlds hardest problems or inventing new products, to the chap who comes to fix the boiler, following the manual, and when it doesn’t work he bills you another 200 quid for a new part, puts it in, and finds out it doesn’t work either. In German there’s a quite distinct difference between the professional graduate engineer and the sort of technician engineer. So we’ve got the sort of one all embracing word that covers a multitude of sins. Secondly, I think if you are in a production environment it’s often very appropriate to like following systems, like developing systems and getting other people to follow them. If on the other hand you’re in research and development you are inventing the new. This is a creative process, a creative job in exactly the same way as being an artist is, and actually I think it’s more interesting than being an artist because in the things I’ve developed as an engineer I actually have to obey the laws of physics. Whereas if I want to splash a bit of paint on a piece of paper, it doesn’t have to, in inverted commas, work.

Anne Swietlik: Probably most people who think about engineers I don’t think they’re clear about what it means, I think they have a ‘well of course anybody can be an engineer if you’ve got a spanner in your hand and an oil can in the other you’re fine’. And of course that’s one aspect of it, but even that side now needs really good problem solving techniques and capabilities and understanding of what makes things work. Now you have to have a particular sort of brain for that to happen, to be successful in doing that. We have very complicated machines here that are probably 350, 400 thousand pounds a time. Because they’re numerically controlled machines you have to have a mathematical and an IT brain as well as being a standard engineer, so you’ve got to have the practical hands-on experience of knowing how, what happens when you cut a piece of metal, and you’ve also got to have this spatial awareness because the machines that we’ve got are working in four and five axes.

Cobi Smith: Anne Swietlik was talking about the typical qualities engineers need. But Suzy Lynch thinks other skills are important as well.

Suzy Lynch: If you’ve got the confidence in your ability technically then you hold your own and you can stand, and actually I think having other, softer skills, when you’re in the boardroom negotiating something and having, you know, a bit of empathy and being able to read people and some of the skills that the other engineers didn’t have meant that I actually stood apart from them, and you know when there was a job available and there was me and four or five other candidates I could bring a bit more to it.

Cobi Smith: So what made these women in engineering entreprenerial? For Laura James, it was the appeal of the startup experience.

Laura James: I think from a fairly early stage I realised academia wasn’t where I wanted to be, mainly just because, although I love research, it’s much more exciting to be able to get a product out and I’ve always liked the idea of actually being able to contribute to something that I can see actual people using. And as such it was always going to be industry rather than academia. My experiences at AT&T were pretty good but I can’t say that I was terribly keen on the giant corporate lifestyle and I could see in some ways that it did hamper the innovation that we were able to make as a team even before we were shut down. So I think that small companies are much more nimble and flexible, and able to be more innovative in general. That’s not true – some big companies do some great, innovative things, but small companies are much more capable of that, and Cambridge is really a place for small companies rather than big corporates, you don’t find many big companies in fact in the high tech space in Cambridge. It tends to be small ones, so it’s a good place to be.

Cobi Smith: For Suzy Lynch, it allowed her to balance work and family.  

Suzy Lynch: I wanted to stay in engineering and manufacturing and I looked around, and it’s all full time jobs. And you know, nobody gives you six weeks summer holiday and all the half terms and two weeks at easter and a week at Christmas, which was another driver to make me think, well okay I’ll do it myself, because if I work for myself then I’ve got the best boss I’ve ever had and I get all the school holidays off if I choose to, you know it puts me back in control. So I think it’s one of those things that once you’ve done it, I don’t think you could ever go back having had the flexibility and the freedom of working for yourself. I can’t think I will ever go back now. But never say never, well see (laughs).

Cobi Smith: There aren’t that many women engineers in the UK, let alone entrepreneurial ones – though this is starting to change.

Suzy Lynch: It’s fairly obvious as soon as you turn up in your lecture theatre with 400 students, you know there might be 30 of you that are women. So it is obviously very male-dominated and all of the work experience I did during my degree, you know, people were very suspicious. ‘Why does a girl want to do engineering?’ And even when I started at Perkins, there’s a factory there with two and half thousand people in it and I was the first female engineer. So it took a while for people to get used to having me around, but actually once they realised that I was an engineer like anybody else, and I was interested in fixing problems, then I was just accepted.

Laura James: It is notable that in every place I’ve worked I’ve been pretty much the only woman, and after a while you just don’t notice that any more. It’s certainly nice to be able to go to trade shows and things and know that there won’t be a queue at the women’s bathroom because the queues are actually in the men’s. But in general, I can’t say that there’s been any particularly strong negatives about that. I’ve had mentors and guides who’ve been both male and female, they’ve both been equally helpful to me over the years.  

Cobi Smith: Suzy Lynch followed by Laura James there. And here’s Suzy again:

Suzy Lynch: They were certainly curious, they had questions like, well you know, ‘why does a nice girl like you want to do engineering?’ I would always just throw it back at them and say ‘well why did you want to do engineering?’ And actually when people thought about it, then there’s nothing, there’s no reason that says that you have to have testosterone to be interested in engineering. So I would always just throw it back, and once people sort of understood that then, and I think once you held your own technically as well, and proved that you were the equal of them, then it was fine. I never really had any problems at all. But I think the other thing that was interesting – some of my colleagues would go home and talk about me, obviously because you talk about your colleagues, and said that their children would say ‘what, you mean there’s a woman in there?’ And actually it was opening up their children’s perceptions of having women in factories and manufacturing, which the dads would come back to me and say, ‘hey it’s great, isn’t this wonderful, my daughter’s now thinking that yes she can work in a factory and yes she can be an engineer’.

Cobi Smith: So, now that we have women engineers, what do you need to do to succeed as an entrepreneur in engineering? Anne Miller has some advice.

Anne Miller: Research and development is a really interesting area of engineering to be in. Courses I run for engineers and sort of innovators are about how to get their ideas adopted. And one of the problems is that there’s a very common view of marketing amongst creative people, both engineers and also in sort of campaigners, and people like that, that actually it’s vaguely, you know, disreputable and distasteful. They see all the sort of spin and manipulation that goes on and they label that as marketing and say, well actually, it’s my idea, I want it to sell on its own merits, I want people to see the intrinsic beauty and truth of my idea and it will sell itself. Of course the sad reality is it doesn’t. So it just sits there, and then either they get frustrated, and so you know they go off and they moan to their mates but nothing happens. Or they start getting sort of angry and shouting louder, and trying to force their idea through and bulldoze it through, which of course then just makes people resist it even more. You know, creative cats are hard to manage, they get stroppy and they walk out, or they get pushed out. So there’s almost this sort of belief that you shouldn’t do it, which means that even the most obvious marketing ideas like telling people about your idea or finding a succinct way of explaining it, or explaining what the need is that it’s trying to address, often get ignored.

Suzy Lynch: I suppose I was a bit naïve really, I just thought well I’ll give it a go. So I approached a couple of big companies in the area, the first one being the company I used to work for, and they said yes please, come and help us, we’re trying to set up a new facility for a very, very different product, so it’s a slightly different part of the company that I’d been working for, but the obviously knew my reputation and knew my skills and experience and that was exactly what they were looking for. So I did a very successful project for them which then led to two others, by which time I began to gain confidence in my skills as a consultant, as well as just an operational manager and a manufacturing specialist, which then gave me the confidence to phone other companies and say, ‘hey, I’m here’, and really it’s just grown from there because every project has led on to two or three others. So I haven’t really invested heavily in marketing, because actually I don’t think people google to find a manufacturing specialist. I think in the sort of sector that I’m working in it’s all very much word of mouth, who have you worked with, who’s been good, and it’s all about recommendation.

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