IN THE HOT SEAT
Director of Cool Concerns, past president of the Institute of Refrigeration and listed in the Telegraph’s recent Top 50 Women In Engineering.
Jane Gartshore
How did you get into the acr industry? By accident! I went to a convent, an all girls school. It just so happened that we didn’t have a physics teacher at A Level. We were sent to the local boys school, which was a lot of fun and the teacher there said I should look at engineering as career, so I went on to do engineering at university. Refrigeration came about because I was offered a graduate training place with Prescold. This was mainly because the person in charge of graduate recruitment was a woman who was very keen to get more women into the business.
What do you personally most enjoy about working in the industry? The variety. And I’ve been lucky joining the industry at a time when there has been a lot of change, especially with refrigerants and trying to reduce the environmental impact of refrigeration systems.
There are also a great variety of people and that is one of the things that is good about engineering and refrigeration – it’s a level playing field.
I run a business with another engineer who has come to the same end result from a completely different route – he started off as an apprentice and eventually progressed up to managing and directing a team of 100 service engineers. It doesn’t really matter where you start, the end result can be the same.
And I think that makes for a very diverse industry.
What is the best aspect of the industry? We’ve had major challenges with replacing ozone depleting refrigerants. The reduction of the hole in the ozone layer announced recently shows that we can meet these challenges.
What is the worst aspect of the industry?
as a refrigerant. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best technical solution for retail refrigeration, because to try and improve the efficiencies of the CO2
We don’t necessarily implement the best technical solutions for problems. For example, the major change to CO2
But the problem is deeper than that. People coming out of school and going into this sort of job don’t have a good basic grounding in maths, science or even written English. We really see that when we assess and train engineers from the UK, but as we know, a lot of the engineers that work in the UK aren’t from here, they’re from Eastern Europe, or further afield, and we see a definite difference in basic education. They have better basic foundation in maths and science.
systems so it matches an old HFC system, we have to make the system more complicated. To my mind, good engineering is simple engineering. Not all retailers use CO2
in the
as a secondary fluid rather than in a transcritical booster system. They are much simpler systems and I think you have to take into account the skill levels of the engineers out there when you’re deciding what is appropriate.
same way. For example, the use of CO2
How crucial is the skills shortage? We’ve trained a lot of engineers and we know that in many cases the basic understanding of how a simple vapour compression system works is not there. You then put those engineers on site with a transcritical booster system and they have no grasp of how the system works. More training is needed, building on the very basic foundation of the F-Gas qualification.
How can we best encourage new people into the industry? By making the engineering industry more visible. Young people know what doctors and shop assistants do for example, but they don’t see what engineers do. They don’t understand the depth and breadth of engineering as a career, how interesting it is and the challenges that there are. And the fact that it can be a sexy career. That’s difficult to change though. Perhaps there should be more TV programmes where engineers are featured in some way. And careers advice to teenagers – people I’ve spoken with who have children of that age have said that there is no careers advice at school. Because funding gets cut and it’s something that’s not seen as being important.
Did you have a role model? No one person in particular, but there were a number of people that I admired – some for their ability to deal with
customers, others for their breadth and depth of knowledge. I wanted to do what they did and be as good as they were.
What is the biggest challenge of being a woman in the acr industry? Initially, when people don’t know who you are, it’s getting across to them that I am an engineer and I do know what I’m talking about – especially when talking to people on the phone. It’s that initial impression that is the hardest to get past. Once people know you, then I don’t think there are any particular differences between men and women.
What strengths do women bring to the industry?
I think that men and women think things through differently, which results in a complementary nature of working and problem solving.
What advice would you give to any youngsters, especially girls, about entering into engineering as a career? Don’t have a chip on your shoulder about being female and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. It’s a brilliant career and you might do things differently, but not worse, and in some ways better.
What do you think is the biggest challenge for the industry? Continuing what we’re already doing, improving environmental performance of refrigeration systems and doing that with due regard to what the skill level is out there.
www.acr-news.com
August 2016 21
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