My name is Jane Simpson and I went to the University of Birmingham in 1994 and I graduated from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering with a masters.
I became a graduate with Network Rail - British Rail as it was at the time - and I worked for the industry for about twenty years. I was the first female Chief Engineer of the railways.
Two years ago, I left Network Rail and I joined Severn Trent Water. And I'm here heading up the capital delivery and I deliver about 1.3 billion pounds worth of projects.
One of the great things that I'm doing at the moment is the Birmingham resilience programme. We have a massively great sustainable water source from Elan Valley in Wales that comes into Birmingham and it feeds 1.3 million people.
For 50 days every year, from 2020, we've got to maintain that massive great big aqueduct. So one of the ways we're going to communicate that is by giving a book to school children and this is a fantastic book because it explains all about the Elan Valley aqueduct, how water gets to you, why water's so precious and so important to people in their lives, but also all the engineering that we need to do around it. So that's informing children all about engineering and all about Severn Trent at the same time as informing parents around why do we need to do the project.
Engineering is all about making the complex easy, creating solutions, being creative, we have to be massively creative as engineers. And the other thing, the thing that really switches me, on is leaving a legacy. I love the fact that everything I've done in my career leaves a legacy for over a hundred years to come.
I'm really keen on getting anyone into engineering. We just need a bigger, diverse pool of people that want to become an engineer. We have such a huge skills gap. I was good at maths and physics, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so my dad basically told me to apply for lots of apprenticeships and actually it was completely the right decision. You can join as an apprentice and go all the way through a company and they'll sponsor you to do a degree, which is great.
For me, it was really important to get university education. It allowed me to apply for jobs that I possibly wouldn't have been able to apply for - it would have taken me a lot longer to achieve if I'd only gone through the apprenticeship route.
I think the other thing that I really massively took from doing my Masters particularly at Birmingham was it opened up my eyes to research and I've used that so much in my career today.
Within the last five years, I've actually gone back to the University of Birmingham and worked with Professor Clive Roberts on how to take bench research that he's done and how do we apply it to the railway? What was great was the fact that I could work with students and give them really great projects that we would then translate into something that we could actually use on the railway.
Engineering and science are huge, huge subjects. You can go in like me and you can know a little about a lot and you can lead lots of people, or you become very specialist and you can know a lot about a little - but you're the technical expert. So what a fantastic opportunity is that?
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