Engineering at Vodafone UK | Hear from our People – Catherine

For the last 9 months I have been on secondment as a Field Services Manager looking after a team of field engineers, covering Leeds, Newcastle, and Cumbria. Our field engineers deliver services to our enterprise customers and installing and maintaining our Fixed & Mobile Networks. It is an amazingly varied and interesting role.

My early introduction to technology was working indirectly with a small comms company, in 1991 Craycom offered me a fulltime role. After a few years I had a secondment into field services as an area controller looking after Field Engineers based in Scotland, part of that role was also Spares Management looking after inventory of equipment in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

I was very inquisitive and loved learning about the various pieces of equipment. The engineers I worked with could see my passion for learning and would spend time with me to answer my constant questions. I eventually had the chance to take on a trainee engineer role, at that time there were only two other female engineers in the whole country.

My next step was moving into Project Management delivering customer Projects working closely with Field Services on impact to field engineering. I moved role again to work on a customer account for about 3 years but then approached with another role working directly with field as a Field Implementation Authority, which led to my current secondment.

Looking back at my career, I started with Craycom in 1991 and have been through many changes, from Cray Communications, Anite, Cable, and Wireless and now Vodafone. My passion has stayed with field and technology, it is ever changing and constant learning as technology never stands still for a second, it is impossible not to be excited about what comes next.

For anyone considering a career in Technology, there are so many roles that don’t require a technology background, my biggest piece of advice is never stop asking questions, no one can know everything and if you ask for help there are an amazing amount of people who will be more than willing to support you.