I enjoyed school. I seemed to find a pretty good balance between study, friends and sports. I also liked that we were treated as adults from early on in our schooling.
Differently. My career aspiration, since I was in Grade 2, was to be a teacher. When I finished school, I had been accepted into secondary teaching in Ballarat and Adelaide, but I wanted to take a gap year first, so I deferred. That’s when the traineeship at Wannon Water popped up.
After 3-4 months at Wannon Water, people started asking me about what I was going to do after the traineeship, and if I was interested in studying engineering. Then management approached me and suggested to seriously consider completing an engineering degree. They also offered to support me.
I enrolled in Civil Engineering at Deakin as an off campus student. In addition to my studies, I was working for Wannon Water 24-30 hours per week, who were a great support. They paid for all my tuition and gave me time off to prepare for and do my exams.
Once I had completed my degree, Wannon Water put me through a Graduate Rotation Program. This program sees graduates work for a time in each department. Planning, Asset Creation, Maintenance, and Asset Systems. During this program a position became available in the area that I wanted – Asset Creation. During my studies I knew that this was the area that I liked and it best suited my skills.
Civil Engineers design, build and manage infrastructure. Communication skills are very important as I spend most of my time liaising with different stakeholders. This could be different departments within Wannon Water, or contractors, Council and residents. Usually I am in the office 60% of the time, but in the past two months I have been in the office for maybe 6 days.
It’s a very male dominated industry. There are around 40 men to 5 women working in engineering. At Uni we had over 100 graduate when I did, and 4-5 of those were girls. This is slowly changing.
When I finished school, I applied for one of the Sports Traineeships at Emmanuel and missed out. I know, if I had’ve got it, I would have definitely gone on and completed a teaching degree. So I would never have discovered this passion, and skill set I have now.
Opportunities come, things can change and its ok to change your plans.
