Naval spell launches voyage of discovery

In an article in the April 2016 issue of HEJ, we highlighted the current UK shortage of female engineers, focused on some of the reasons for the difficulty in recruiting young women, and considered some of the key steps bodies including professional institutes need to take to address the ‘gender gap’. Here, in the first of a series of planned follow-up articles on successful women engineers’ careers, HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, talks to Claire Hennessy FIHEEM, who, as head of Operational Estates and Facilities at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, is responsible for the smooth day-to-day running of the buildings and plant at four busy hospitals. As she explained, she gained her first engineering experience looking after weaponry in the Royal Navy.

While some entrants to a particular profession follow in the footsteps of a parent or other relative, or pursue a long-held ambition, Claire Hennessy’s introduction to the engineering world happened ‘more or less by chance’. She explained: “At 17 I was keen to travel the world, and joining the Royal Navy seemed a great idea. However joining up really only occurred to me because, when I was about nine, my sister’s friend had joined the service as an air engineering mechanic, and often came back telling fantastic stories about places she had been. In those days women weren’t at sea, so it was very much a land-based role. She was nevertheless travelling to what, as a nine-year-old, sounded some quite exotic places – and her stories had a big impact.”

Having started studying ‘A’ levels, but become ‘a bit disillusioned’ with education – she grew up on a council estate in Oxford where university ‘was never really discussed’ – Claire Hennessy left school at 17, and began work as a trainee butcher role at a local Co-op. She explained: “The Co-op wanted me to study butchery, but I decided the role wasn’t for me, and left to allow somebody else to come in and take the college place.” While working in a local McDonalds’s store, she saw an Army & Navy careers office in Oxford one lunchtime, and thought: ‘I want to travel and will learn a trade, which will give me something useful to fall back on’.