Engineering Is For All: Gemma McCarthy, Vice President at ACEI (member-only)

Professional engineers often face the constraint of being pigeonholed into specific roles based on demographic factors, yet the most successful teams are those that dismantle these barriers.

When engineering is embraced as a truly gender-neutral career, it unlocks a powerful diversity of thought that drives innovation and superior project outcomes. Engineering problem solving requires a blend of scientific rigour and creative thinking to deliver impactful results. We explore how to break free from professional boxes, manage complex large-scale infrastructure projects, and incorporate social value into procurement.

Joining us is Gemma McCarthy, Vice President of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland and Regional Director at Mott MacDonald. Gemma shares her expertise on leading multidisciplinary teams and offers a fresh perspective on how inclusive, gender-neutral leadership paves the way for a more successful and dynamic engineering profession.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
●   Solving the Celtic Interconnector challenge
●   Engineering as a creative discipline
●   Managing large infrastructure budgets
●   Implementing social value in procurement
●   The future generation of engineers

GUEST DETAILS
Gemma McCarthy is the Vice President of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland and a Regional Director at Mott MacDonald. She combines high-level technical direction with strategic leadership in the Irish engineering sector. Gemma is a strong advocate for diverse representation, leveraging her experience to drive professional development and infrastructure solutions for society. She has spent 15 years with Mott MacDonald overseeing major regional operations.

Connect with Gemma:
● Website: https://www.acei.ie
● Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemma-mccarthy-5681a717/

QUOTES

"I used to rail against the, are you creative, are you scientific? Engineering is very much the crossover of the two". - Gemma McCarthy

"At the end of the day, we're problem solvers". - Gemma McCarthy

"We are only as good as the currency of our own skills at the moment". - Gemma McCarthy

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience here is an AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes 0:01
Right now, on Amplified...

Gemma McCarthy 0:03
I used to rail against the, are you creative, are you scientific? Engineering is very much the crossover of the two. You're never going to get to a solution until you can think outside of the box, using some of the scientific foundations and principles, but you absolutely have to be a creative, creating something new to make things better.

Dusty Rhodes 0:25
Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to Amplified, the Engineer's Journal podcast. One of the biggest problems in any job is being put in a box, could be because of your age, your gender, your background, or any one of a number of reasons. How do you break the cycle? Get out of that box and work on what you really want to work on. We're in for a fascinating conversation today, which takes all of that in, plus how mapping back roads of cork solved a thorny Ireland, France problem. The latest on some engineering issues the government is being lobbied about, and a startling but very positive view of engineering from the next generation who are entering the business. Joining us for all of this is the Vice President of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland and Regional Director Dublin for Mott MacDonald. It's a pleasure to welcome Gemma McCarthy. How are you?

Gemma McCarthy 1:18
I'm good, delighted to be here.

Dusty Rhodes 1:21
Gemma, let me start off with what got you into this old career of engineering.

Gemma McCarthy 1:27
What got me into it, I think, was probably the essence of many engineers. At the end of the day, we're problem solvers. I was the kid who did stare at the door handle and go, 'How does that work? I think that's a lot of what led me there. I will say to you, I have always railed against being put in a box. You're good at this or you're good at that. So, I think I studied art in school. I studied physics and chemistry and biology in school. So, it was very much a case of the science, the art. If you tell me I'm one, I'm probably going to outgo the other direction. The career guidance teacher in an all-girls school, heading you in one direction, and engineering - there weren't that many of us. The interesting thing was, in my school, there were three girls who, out of the class of 20 in honours maths, went on to engineering, so three out of 11 out of the class of 60 was pretty unusual. So maybe that was part of it, but it was the problem solving at the end of the day. It was, give me a challenge, I really like to solve a problem at the end of the day, that really is what engineering is about. What do we got? How do we get from the problem to the solution? And I think that's the essence of where we come from, effectively as engineers.

Dusty Rhodes 2:26
You started out with ESB and did some time with Schneider Electric, Mott McDonald's. You've been working with them for the last 15 years. When you're kind of looking back, say, in the last 1015, years, what's your favourite project story to tell?

Gemma McCarthy 2:37
Actually, one of the ones that I suppose stays alive for me, because it's nearly there at the moment, is we secured the consents for the Celtic Interconnector, and I think the one thing that really hammers home for me is that, yes, the Celtic Interconnector is a, it is a project very much on a national scale, but it has both impact and importance and local engagement, so it is a 700 megawatt connection between the Irish and the French grids, we had to look at consent and discussions and agreements with passing through UK-related waters, but at the same time the whole thing was about making sure that we had the right landing point connection into the grid and the right site for the converter station itself. So working with Air Grid was a dream because they very much knew that at the essence of Irish infrastructure you've got to win the hearts and the minds of the people that deliver these

Dusty Rhodes 3:21
now, for those of us who are not experts at laying underwater cables, tell us roughly what the project involves, and what was it that you did.

Gemma McCarthy 3:29
So, the Celtic Interconnector is a 700 megawatt connection between the Irish and the French grids. It will transport energy between the two energy systems, Ireland and France. So, what it does, it'll connect into the Irish grid in Knockwad in Cork, and Mott Macdonald were responsible for the onshore consents within the Irish jurisdiction. So, effectively, what we had to do, we knew where it was going to connect in terms of the grid. The most appropriate place was in a substation just north of Cork City, and being a Corkonian, it was nice to be back home again for this, but we had to figure out where was the right place to bring it ashore, and then how to navigate. East Cork is full of little laneways, a warren of lots and lots of small roads leading down to some fabulous beaches, but to get from there to North Cork, while finding a major site that was suitable for converting from HVDC, which is a DC connection under the water, to the AC system, that is the Irish grid that was a challenge, and finding the right sites that had the least impact on local communities, but was the right environmental choice that was a challenge, and one that ultimately it secured around Bally Adam, the industrial zone around the railway, actually near to Lenthon. It's under construction at the moment, so it's great to watch the progress of it as it's going,

Dusty Rhodes 4:41
isn't it funny how you can lay hundreds of kilometres of electric cable underneath the sea, and the problem is a laneway in Cork.

Gemma McCarthy 4:49
Yeah, completely,

Dusty Rhodes 4:50
always the last mile,

Gemma McCarthy 4:52
completely. And I have to admit, one of the things that I found really interesting about it is that because you had a huge selection of that, how do you pick which laneway is better? There we ultimately ended up using the same algorithm that powers up Google Maps, you know, the directions to get from A to B effectively, and not just the shortest route. We layered a whole load of different criteria one on top of the other, and then ran the same algorithm to decide which one would have the least environmental impact, which would be the least expensive, which one would have the fewer amounts of bends, because they're difficult to navigate with the cable. So, it was from that perspective, it was interesting.

Dusty Rhodes 5:27
Listen, you are Regional Director for Dublin with Mott Macdonald. What's your day to day like?

Gemma McCarthy 5:32
The day to day can be very varied. I suppose I hold a couple of hats in that I have throughout my career, I have worked in energy, I started with ESP, I've worked in water services, and I'm now leading the transportation team across Ireland for Mac McDonald, but I also hold a city's role, which is across all of the different sectors, and it's probably with the range that having travelled through all of them, it's a really interesting one. The day to day can be anything, it can be bringing particular projects through decision making internally, it can be engaging with clients, but one of the ones we're working on at the moment is it's an EU-funded project with Irish Rail, it's called the Connect project, and really it's about strategy implementation. So I have to admit I find it an inspirational one, because Iran or there, and have developed a strategy of where they see themselves in 2050 This is, I suppose, one of the projects where we have the luxury and sometimes the burden of not necessarily having a boundary on what we're looking at, you're looking at the whole network, and sometimes it means that you can see that particular project as they're developing, maybe not necessarily fitting with the overall roadmap, or equally that there are different blockers that are getting in the way of all of the projects. It's been a challenging project, it's been very time constrained, it's probably one that all of us would like to have done a few years ago, getting to a great place in it at the moment, and it's delivering a huge amount. One of the things that has been really interesting about it, though, is the breadth that it has reached across the client organisation in here, nor there, and we've engaged across everything in fleet operations, timetabling, the infrastructure itself, and what the railway will look like, and all of that is with an ambition to deliver incredibly transformative services for the travelling public. So, you've ended up with it. They will be aiming towards things like a 90 minute service to Cork, 90 minute service to Belfast, same to Galway, Limerick, and Waterford, and then connectivity across the rest of the country. So, it'll get us all out of our cars, because we want to get out of our cars. A

Dusty Rhodes 7:25
lot of what you're talking about, I mean, they are big, difficult projects, and trying to keep those things on time and within budget is a heck of a skill when you're working on a large engineering project like that, and it starts falling behind or it starts blowing its budget. What's your mindset for getting everything back on track?

Gemma McCarthy 7:46
One of the first things I would say to you is that working in any engineering project, you're never on your own. Teamwork and communication, it's one of the fundamental skills, and it's probably not one we focus on early enough in our education of engineers, to be honest. Tod speaks about the T-shaped engineer, which is this lovely concept of needing to be a generalist enough to have a depth of knowledge in some spaces, but to have enough of a general knowledge to know where you need support in others. It's really important when it starts going off the rails. It is really important to be able to step back and to calm things down. I've had a number of different projects, particularly around the strategy side, where a delivery team is being asked to deliver something that has not yet ever been done anywhere. It's really important when you're leading in that kind of a project to be able to take in the ambition that is coming from those who are setting scope and those who are trying to achieve the project, to be able to settle and deliver a very clear direction to the delivery teams that needs to be calm, to understand the project, to step back and be able to see an overview of where it might be going wrong is really, really important, I think.

Dusty Rhodes 8:48
So, is that a kind of a case of where you're trying to step back and to look at it from a helicopter point of view, or to say something like, you know, what would Nikola Tesla do with this to keep it on track? Is that what you mean?

Gemma McCarthy 8:58
Yes, absolutely. Nobody sets out to do a bad job, nobody does, but it's often little things that have gone a little bit wrong. People that are trying too hard to do something too fast, and sometimes you need those checks and balances in place. You can move quickly, but you can't move too fast, and stuff gets ahead of itself. But being able to calm things down, let people step back and understand what the issue is, and then step in to resolve it. I think that's absolutely key.

Dusty Rhodes 9:22
I think little things going wrong. What an amazing point. And it takes somebody like yourself to just kind of go say it, and you kind of go, boom.

Gemma McCarthy 9:29
It's funny, I had to, I suppose, in my very first job, my very first boss said to me, it's not the big things that go wrong in the project, and at the time I was working in substations, it's never the earth, rarely the major circuit breakers, or the major pieces of equipment, or even the conductor. It is the little piece of what they call the interconnectors, or the HV connectors. It's the piece between the wire and the equipment, and they're the simple things. And as a result of it being relatively small in cost and relatively small overall, they're the things that people forget about. So that interface is. Often, where things can slip, it's

Dusty Rhodes 10:02
like having 1000 euro TV set, and then you lose the remote control.

Gemma McCarthy 10:05
Yeah, exactly. That's completely

Dusty Rhodes 10:07
useless. Like, you know, Gemma, let me ask you about your other role, which is Vice President of the Association of Consulting Engineers in Ireland. You, I believe, are the second female Vice President.

Gemma McCarthy 10:20
Yeah, I am.

Dusty Rhodes 10:20
Is this a change in the industry? Because people are always talking like there's not enough women in high roles. I think this is great news, is it?

Gemma McCarthy 10:27
It's fabulous news. Very proud to follow the footsteps of Anne Marie Connor Bear, a couple of years ago. And actually, our second vice president is also a woman, so Sinead Timoney will come in behind me. I think it's important. Certainly, ACI would see the need for us to ensure that we've got diverse rooms that we're, my background is infrastructure. Infrastructure, at the end of the day, is delivered for society. Society isn't only male, it's not just the male, female, it's not just gender, it's across the board, you know. If we're delivering infrastructure across anything, it's for society. So it's important that the you are designing it, understanding the problems that people are trying to solve by that infrastructure had a really interesting piece come across my feed on LinkedIn recently. I think illustrates this. The piece I saw was transport professional who was at a conference, I think in Zurich, certainly one of the cities in Switzerland. She was heading for the metro, backpack on her back, on the way home from the conference, waiting for a metro, and probably lost in thought as to everything that was going on during the day. So the train pulled up at the platform. She went straight into the carriage again, still probably in transport professional mode, and she walked into. She said the sea of colour. None of the seats were in a straight line. There were little desks. There were pictures all over the walls. There was a little raised area with a slide down from it. There were a couple of toys littered around the place, but this was a family-friendly carriage. And she said in herself, her demeanour just shifted. She said she walked in and she grinned, and she suddenly realised, at home, I'm a mom, and I have two young kids. And the one thing she noticed is the parents around her were relaxed, the kids were having a bit of crack, they were sliding down the slide and landing on the floor. She said by the end of it, she noticed that it wasn't just her, there were other commuters around the place that were playing peek a boo with the kids. So that notion that you know it's not just the commuters, the professional commuters coming home from a conference that are using the metro systems, it's the parents, it's the young kids, and to have that level of stress removed from their lives in order to engage with something like a transport infrastructure that makes a huge difference, and who would have thought of that if you had just a very homogeneous design team. You need to have people in the rooms who are thinking those things through, who are engaging with differing life experiences.

Dusty Rhodes 12:38
That's it. And it's different life experiences, it's different ages, it's different generations, it's different genders, it's different nationalities. It's even like, look, Ireland is a small country, but there could be a huge difference between the mindset of somebody from Donegal and somebody from Cork, or even the accents and stuff like that. Like, you know,

Gemma McCarthy 12:53
completely, you bring it out in me now.

Dusty Rhodes 12:55
When you bring all of that together, it's kind of like, you know, you're getting the strength of many things.

Gemma McCarthy 13:01
Yes, absolutely, completely.

Dusty Rhodes 13:03
I think it works in that. So, listen, Vice President of the Association of Consulting Engineers in Ireland, what are you hoping to achieve with your time in that role?

Gemma McCarthy 13:11
One of the things I'm really passionate about is about Ireland is on the precipice of making a major investment, probably the biggest investment that we've made as a state in infrastructure in its history, I really want to make sure that we are doing that to get the best possible outcome for the whole of society from it. You know, it's not just about buying the infrastructure in itself, it's not just about buying a Mitrolink or an extension to the Dart system, or putting in offshore wind, or bringing water from the Shannon. We're going to need support internationally for this. There's a very strong market in Ireland for delivering construction. We've always been really, really good at it, but we will need to bring in some more international players. It's really important that we learn from that investment in infrastructure, that as we're developing these projects, that we make sure that we reach across society, that we gain more from it than just the infrastructure itself. I mean, opportunities that come to mind always are around the education, the developing of the next generation, making sure that they're embedded in the development of this generation of infrastructure, so that they are available to maintain. They will be the people who are going to not only maintain and operate it, but live with that infrastructure, and probably expand it. I just think it's really important that we tap into that, we make sure right now we're in the procurement stages of a number of those different big infrastructure investments, and if we embed those requirements into the procurement stages, all of those international players are used to and deliver elsewhere massive social value in other economies. Need to make sure Ireland doesn't miss that opportunity. It's a real sense of a win-win. It's one of the things that really gets me going, that win-win.

Dusty Rhodes 14:43
Continually looking at things from the Association of Consulting Engineers in Ireland, you, I imagine, are lobbying governments to a certain extent on things like social value and allocation of risk.

Gemma McCarthy 14:57
Can

Dusty Rhodes 14:57
you tell me about these two things? Social value first.

Gemma McCarthy 15:00
Social value is very much around making sure that when we are procuring major infrastructure or major projects at a public level that we're requiring the contractors or the consultants to deliver on social improvements in the area of the project itself. This can take lots of different forms. It can be things like one of the things that I see as being a huge benefit, would be there are times in my organisation there may be particular experts in a field that would be of benefit to engineering programmes in the local area. Equally, there are times that we would like to be able to engage apprentices or student engineers from a low-income area, or whatever, related to a particular project. If we can associate the two, what you can do in the likes of procurement processes is you can incentivize the procurement process to deliver on making sure you employ students from a local university or invest in the local economy to some degree. It's really important, I think, that when we're now at a position that we are effectively a major international investor in our own infrastructure, and we're drawing interest from abroad that we ensure that we instil some of that value back into our own economy afterwards, building opportunity for the kids of the future.

Dusty Rhodes 16:11
How do you then, because I would argue straight back, and I would say, well, okay, if you're going to take in people from university, I mean, the experience is fantastic, yeah, but how do you account for that in a budget, and then how do you stand over the quality of the actual project, because you've got like essentially a trainee,

Gemma McCarthy 16:27
you do, there's two things on it, firstly, one of the things you really need to think about is we're trying to achieve a lot of these objectives across a wider sphere than, and I mean, Ireland is trying to achieve this across a wider sphere than the infrastructure department in itself, so if you have, for example, and I'm not trying to tell the government how to do their job, but if you have the Department of Transportation or the Department of Energy sponsoring a project, but you have the Department of Further Education sponsoring some other objective, if the two come together, the likelihood is you're going to drive something that is greater than the sum of its parts, drawing from budget, maybe from either side, that's the budget side of it, I think, because I think we do need to raise up the view of what is the value we're getting out of this. It may be I think we can drive more value than the infrastructure itself, and I think we can drive more benefit that'll benefit and value that may not necessarily be seen specifically by the infrastructure or specifically measured by the development of the infrastructure, you probably will reap the benefits in terms of leaving a legacy of a skilled workforce behind. That's something that isn't always necessarily measured in terms of the quality aspect, that's absolutely built into the delivery of the contract itself. So, yes, you do need to employ apprentices and trainees. The thing is that's part and parcel of their experience and their education. So, at the end of the day, the contractor delivering the project and employing these trainees is responsible for checking and ensuring that the work is going out well. It's a huge opportunity for our engineers, who can sit side by side with senior people who will check and validate their work and will guide what they're doing is in lots of ways drives far greater learning than the lectures that you receive in college will ever do.

Dusty Rhodes 18:08
I couldn't agree more with you, Gemma. We take on interns every now and again, and the way we look at it is they're in for three months or six months, we give them a project that's not particularly important, but it's something that needs to be done, and then at the end of it they get a letter from us, and the letter just says such and such was in for this period of time working on this particular project, and that's how they did never mention intern, never, because they can't use it. Do you know when who wants to go? Yeah, work for them for free, that's no use to you. So, but what you're saying in there is like actually working on a real job with people and mentors and people above you, you just, you can't beat it. So that side of social value, I think, is fantastic. The other side of social value, am I correct in thinking what you're saying is, if you're building like a large infrastructure, say a Metrolink or you know a motorway or something like that, that the design of the project should also include things like, well, are we going to put a park over here, or are we going to improve the life of people who live near this particular project?

Gemma McCarthy 19:05
It can do, I think, where it drives most benefit is where you relate it directly to the infrastructure. So, I think the contractor who is delivering a particular piece of the motorway or the bridge or whatever probably would have less confidence in delivering a park. It's not their core business as such, but what they are really good at is training up apprentices and trainees. What they're really good at is making sure that they leave a legacy of the understanding behind the design concept, or what are the drawbacks of this particular type of approach, and that goes on then in the Irish workforce to inform the next stage and the next expansion. I think, we tend to use slightly different terms, and that community benefit is about making sure that you instil and you deliver more than just the infrastructure, particularly if a community is poorly impacted. So one of the key things around that is about making sure that when we're developing a project, you go into a community and understand and. Go in and say we'd like to build you a park, but you go in and you say, what does this community need? What is really important about this community? We are planning a bridge over here. You then draw from a community what's really important to them. What would they like to gain from this? We've got a great story of a project that was built in, I think it was in London. It was one of the UK cities. It was largely a residential one, but they went in so early they had very few of the principles of the project set down, but they engaged with the local community because this was in a derelict zone that had been barricaded off for a number for decades, probably loads of graffiti, wasteland inside, that kind of thing. They engaged with the community and drew from them, who are the people who understand what it is we need out of this. They developed as part of the housing area a little park within that wasteland area, plus a social centre and a youth club, which is thriving as a result, and it has turned the area around, which means the community flourishes as well.

Dusty Rhodes 20:56
Makes a huge difference when you start these other side of things. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about was the allocation of risk and getting that right. Can you explain that concept to me?

Gemma McCarthy 21:06
I suppose we've been very prudent in Ireland. We have developed this. It's really important to have cost certainty for the state, that we want to make sure we're not wasting public money, and in doing so, developing that cost certainty has meant that we're allocating a lot of the risk away from the state, which on the face of it sounds like a really sensible thing, a really prudent thing to do. Why should the state carry the risk? But sometimes the client or the state is best placed to control that risk, and sometimes if nobody can control the risk, it's better to hold it at client or at state level, so that if it happens, you pay for it, but if it doesn't, you don't. The thing is, if you hand it to a contractor or any other party who has no control on the risk, if they've no control on it, if you can't put control mechanisms in place to make sure you minimise the risk of something happening at the end of the day, you have to be prudent as a business and say, well, we've got to allow for it happening, so we'll set our prices to include for if it does happen, it means as a client or as a state, effectively you're paying for whatever the risk is happening 100% of the time, instead of managing that. Sometimes it'll happen and sometimes it won't.

Dusty Rhodes 22:14
I want to kind of wrap up our conversation today, just chat about careers, actually, in general. You are all over this, all right, because you literally have a family of engineers.

Gemma McCarthy 22:25
I do. I do actually have a lovely photograph behind me up here somewhere of myself and my cousins. When we were, I'd say I was about 10, my sister was about five, but there are five of us in the photograph, and there's only one boy, and there were four engineers and one artist. Now, admittedly, the artist is one of the girls, and they're my mum's family cousins. My dad's family be the same. My dad studied engineering for a while, and my sister's an engineer, and my.. I did marry an engineer, so my two daughters probably didn't have much hope to be anything else, but they are now both students, and well, one is graduating later this year, so engineers bound here. I'm afraid

Dusty Rhodes 23:03
this is what I wanted to ask you about. All right, because particularly with your daughters, okay? Why are they looking at engineer as a great career choice? What is it for this new generation that's coming in that they go, yeah,

Gemma McCarthy 23:15
for them actually it's funny because I think for one, you could have seen very early on, she was very definitely heading in the engineering space. She's been, I suppose, inspired by biomedical engineering. So, one of the things she's always wanted to engage with people, she's a runner academically, she's probably strong in the sciences, but it's one of those things - it's the problem solver, it's the we could do this, that kind of thing. I think she's just finished a thesis looking at deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease, so how you can use engineering solutions to try and really leverage and improve the lives of people, or patients, or those with challenges. The other daughter, interestingly, I think for years I would have thought she was heading in the literature artistic direction. She was a kid who used to keep character arcs of different movies and shows, she was watching. She came home one day, and she just said, "There are people out there who are studying maths and using it to solve problems, and frankly, I want to be one of them. So, I think that they very much see the opportunity to not just fix things, but to make things better, and find that win-win, and finding the solutions that are greater than the sum of their parts. That's a lot of cliches, but most of them are true. There's opportunity, I think, in engineering, and not just opportunity from a career perspective. I used to rail, I think I said to you earlier on, I don't like to be put in a box, but I used to rail against the, are you creative, are you scientific? And engineering is very much the crossover of the two. You're never going to get to a solution until you can think outside of the box, using some of the scientific foundations and principles, but you absolutely have to be a creative. Creating something new to make things better is, I think, where we, we all get our fire from. We

Dusty Rhodes 24:50
touched on gender balance earlier. I'm interested to know now, with your experience with your own daughters, who are kind of just starting to get into it, is that even a thing for them, any? More,

Gemma McCarthy 25:00
it's funny, I don't think it is. Probably because it wasn't for me so much. I think I grew up in a house where my dad probably would be a little bit more traditional, but my mum was - we were left under no illusion her thoughts on what used to be the marriage bar. So, Mum would have worked for Erlingus. She left Erlingis when she got married, and we knew exactly how she thought about that. The thing is, I think myself and my sister grew up in a house where, why wouldn't we, sort of thing. So, I think to a degree, my girls have grown up in the same kind of viewpoint. My husband's exactly the same. I think sometimes this concept of an echo chamber, this concept of a little bubble that I may be out of the centre on that. I think I have been lucky to be to grow up in that situation. I think there are many girls out there who would see a more traditional view that boys tend to be good at maths and girls tend to be good at other things, caring professions. I think that's shifting now. I think it is shifting, but I think we really need to support and nurture it. The thing I would say is always been a strong believer that that equal opportunity for women in engineering applies to men in traditional female professions as well. That's really important.

Dusty Rhodes 26:09
I think that's interesting, because, like, a lot of people say that, oh yeah, boys are good at maths and girls are good at whatever, and there is that, but your house is different, because these two young ladies have grown up, well, mom's an engineer, dad's an engineer, and it looks interesting to me. I'm thinking, oh, just do it, it looks interesting, great money. Do you know what I mean? And off they go, and they do it. They don't have that whole boys do this, whatever. Do you know what I mean? So I think what you're doing in your own home there with those is fantastic, but it's proving the point that if you change people's point of view on something it changes society.

Gemma McCarthy 26:48
Yeah, absolutely. I think our learned experience across society, the more you look into the research of it, is that perception of your strengths because of your gender is very much a learned experience. It's what society has partly expected of us for generations, so when you remove that, it is interesting. The strengths don't necessarily align. I certainly don't. Actually, we

Dusty Rhodes 27:08
have a lot of graduates who listen to the podcast. We have a lot of people who have been working for like 10 years, and that kind of bit. Josh, I need a new challenge, or I'm bored, or I don't like it here. My boss is a complete Richard, but if people are looking for gaps in the market for engineering. Where do you see gaps in the market over the next 510, years?

Gemma McCarthy 27:26
So, I'm an electrical engineer, I'll declare that at the outset, but where I see gaps at the moment is I'm not seeing gaps coming through in the civil side. So, I do see both my daughters are pursuing careers in biomedical engineering, which is a fascinating field, but if I go back to my infrastructure hat, it is the civil engineering side of it that we, and civil engineering, the name of it. It took me years to figure this out, and it was a former MD of the company I'm with. The civil engineer is about society. It's not transport engineering, it's not structural engineering necessarily. It is about society, so it supports all of that infrastructure work, be it a small local water or energy connections, or at major infrastructure level, and I think that's one of the key gaps around the civil space, particularly.

Dusty Rhodes 28:11
And then also thinking about if you want to move on with your career or get into your career, I mean, we mentioned kind of getting trainees and working on real projects. Have you ever done a mentorship programme or worked with a mentor or anything like that

Gemma McCarthy 28:23
myself as a mentee. Oh, very definitely. At different stages throughout my career, I think I've changed a few times. So one of the things I was going to say to you, I thought you were heading in a different direction, was I have changed a few times, and it's taken me, I think, to later on in my career to realise that the job you're looking at right now doesn't necessarily need to be the perfect one. It just needs to be the next one, and there is something you will learn about every job, and what that does, to a degree, is it takes the pressure off this having to be absolutely ideal. You know, you learn from any particular change or direction that you take. I moved from the energy sector, from Schneider Electric into water services at a particular stage in my career, and I found myself, you do sit back inevitably after changes like that, going, what have I done, but I did find myself with my own fifth year chemistry book, weeding that through to understand filtration and coagulation, and all those terms that I hadn't used since school time. In terms of mentoring, I have had different mentors throughout my career. More recently, I think, in stepping into leadership, I did our own internal programme within Mott MacDonald, and I've also done one with Smurfette, but I've worked with a mentor who's based in Scotland, who's Irish, and it's been great to have a sounding board. It's been great to have somebody who is 100% wholly in your corner, but to a degree understands the challenges that you're facing, so it is great to have somebody who you can just take offline when you say that steadying the ship, that calming things down, that looking for the root problem, to have somebody to bounce that off and to test ideas and to judge their facial expressions when you suggest something radical is great. Yeah, so I definitely recommend that.

Dusty Rhodes 30:02
And what about the role of continuous professional development? Have you done that as well?

Gemma McCarthy 30:06
Completely, I mean, it's essential in order to maintain your chartered engineer status. It is a fundamental requirement, but at the end of the day, I think I remember saying, gosh, many years ago we're only as good as the currency of our own skills at the moment, and when you have two daughters in the house who are studying engineering now. They make it very clear to you how much things have changed since your degree. So you do realise that the workplace changes the skills you need to deliver them shift all of the time. For example, AI, and the difference that's going to make to our careers. So absolutely, you need to engage in CPD all of the time. What are the key things I'd look at? I mean, one of the things I think I was really important for me was not just the technical side. It is important to stay on top of your technical skills. A lot of that is learned on the job, in that most of the your technical development, I think, will come from delivering, even if you've learned the original in a classroom setting, it is embedding that will be in the delivery. The other things I think, though, that engineers would always benefit from are the softer skills, the terms and conditions, and contracts, construction contracts, etc. But the softer skills, about the skills of collaboration, teamwork, and communication, are absolutely key.

Dusty Rhodes 31:18
Let me wrap up with you. Just mentioned your daughter's going, it's not like that man anymore, because I'm interested in that generational thing to see, because we have our own experience, and then people are coming into the thing, is
there something that either one of them had said to you, and went, it's not like that, man, and you actually genuinely went, oh my god, really, really, no.

Gemma McCarthy 31:36
What did make me laugh was, I think my final year project was on digital signal processing, and if I look at the state of the technology and the amount of, I hate to say, this assembly language that I had to use to develop code, and I see now the thesis that Kira has developed on deep brain stimulation and how she's used large language models, the clear thing to me is we no longer need to code, we just talk to a machine, so it's those kind of things. The interesting thing is, yes, the interesting thing is, you still need to get into the mindset that if you're telling a computer to do something, you need to be clear in your ask. If you're telling anybody to do something, you need to be clear in your ask, and that comes back to the fundamentals of coding, so this whole prompt, developing a prompt versus writing a code. Yeah, they come from the same principles, but yeah, they've moved on the way I did about

Dusty Rhodes 32:30
coding before, and it scares me when you say that, right? Particularly if that's what the generation coming up, because that's like kind of saying, well, I'll just get the computer to write the code, that's like saying I'll get the computer to design the bridge, okay? Yeah, no, it's great, and the computer can definitely help you, but if you don't know what makes a bridge in the first place, how do you know when the computer's got it wrong, you know? And, like, basic, now I mean, kind of a computer, when I was a kid, was a calculator, all right,

Gemma McCarthy 32:56
yeah,

Dusty Rhodes 32:57
and my dad actually, no, he's a radio engineer, so there you go, runs in the family, but what he used to always say to me about maths, because I never liked maths, but he was absolutely right. He says there's no problem using a calculator to do the thing, but if you don't understand what the calculation is, you're in trouble

Gemma McCarthy 33:12
completely,

Dusty Rhodes 33:13
kind of. I get that from, oh my goodness, all right, okay, great,

Gemma McCarthy 33:17
which is why you see, I think the interesting thing where we're hearing rumblings around AI, meaning that certain sectors are recruiting fewer graduates at this stage. I think that'll come back to haunt us, and I don't see that trend continuing, because if you think about it, you need the, in the case of engineering, if you develop something through AI, you need the five years experienced engineer to check what's coming out, and if we don't recruit the graduates and make sure that they understand how to use the tools, we ain't going to have the five years experience engineer in five years' time.

Dusty Rhodes 33:51
Interesting times ahead. If you'd like to find out more about Gemma McCarthy's work with ACEI and the initiatives we discussed today, you'll find out lots of links and details in the description area for this podcast, but right now, Gemma McCarthy, Vice President of ACE, I and Regional Director at Mott MacDonald. Thank you so much for joining us.

Gemma McCarthy 34:09
Thank you. Really enjoyed it.

Dusty Rhodes 34:11
If you enjoyed our conversation today, please do share this episode with a colleague or friend in the industry. They can find us by searching for Engineers Ireland wherever they get their podcasts. The Amplified Podcast is produced by dust pod.io for Engineers Ireland. For more advanced episodes, industry insights, and more, visit our main hub at Engineers ireland.ie Until next time from a myself Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.