Managing Industry 4.0
The new head of Festo UK reflects on her varied career, and discusses why engineering needs to attract more young people from both sexes. Andrew Wade reports.
With 25 years’ experience in the engineering and technology sector, Eliza Rawlings has held a wide variety of roles throughout her career. An electrical engineer by trade, she was recently appointed as the first woman to head up Festo’s UK operations, having previously worked for the automation specialist as its national sales manager.
Rawlings initially left Festo in 2010 to become managing director at Cloud Direct, an experience that will no doubt aid her as she leads Festo into the Industry 4.0 era. The Engineer caught up with her to hear about her journey into engineering, expanding her management skill set, and how more women can be encouraged to enter the industry.
“I was always interested in the science- and maths-type subjects,” she explained. “So that’s what I did for A-levels: physics, chemistry and maths.”
At her school in Bristol, Rawlings happened to be taking her A-levels just a stone’s throw from a local engineering start-up by the name of Renishaw.
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