Kobi Mustafa

Said the following about Charlotte Cove:

“Charlotte is passionate about inspiring the next generation of diverse engineers to join the railway family. She has been running a structured work experience programme for the last three years which has gone from strength to strength; with thirteen young people taking part this year, taking the total to over 30 young students.

Knowing of the many bad experience’s students have suffered Charlotte decided to develop and lead a work experience programme that comprised of the students picking one of nine different work-based challenges to involve them in a task over the week cumulating in a presentation and report giving them a valuable output.

Charlotte also inspired her work colleagues by arranging talks to the students about their roles and careers. Her ambition was to cover as many different skills and topics as possible ranging from technical skills on programme controls, planning, estimating, consents, sustainability, project management, risk & value management and a range of engineering disciplines, to career development skills on CV writing, career pathways and undertaking effective presentations. This has resulted in friendly competition within the team to be recognised as giving the best talk or presentation.

Charlottes determination and commitment is necessary to manage the resources and safety for each student along with the time from busy individuals during a short school holiday window outside of her role as an Engineer.

The result has been feedback from students like “This experience is very well structure with a wide range of presentation from individuals as well as satisfactory level of work to keep us busy and occupied in this time, well done and thank you” and what did you enjoy “the different experiences, the community and hopefully I’ll be coming back a third time” and even “I’ve had a think over the weekend and decided that the apprenticeship with network rail really interests me”.

Charlotte has also been keen to attract women into the engineering field by stipulating this within the notices so should could inspire them with her own experiences and that of other female engineers within the team.

It has been fantastically rewarding to see so many young people look at the Rail industry in a total different light, a better understanding of what it does and the varied careers that can be pursued all thanks Charlotte.“