Recruitment
“Olaia works as a Senior Civil Engineer within the Rail Consulting South business of Amey. Olaia has a positive ‘can do’ attitude and never hesitates to take any challenges. Whenever there is an issue a project, Olaia is the ‘Go to Guru’.
When a platform extension design project was running severely behind schedule, we brought Olaia into that job. She took the initiative and coordinated with other discipline leads and the Client and agreed some important milestone activities by splitting the critical and non-critical civils design works. This approach helped to bring things back on track and successfully complete this job. Similarly she helped the ancillary civils team working on the Wales and Borders team to develop a deliverable tracker and prioritise deliverables. As part of this project, she also standardised the foundation designs for OLE and eliminated the need for bespoke foundations.
Since becoming a Chartered Engineer, Olaia became a delegated Engineer and help the junior members of the team with their professional development. Olaia has also willingly took over line management responsibilities a couple of years ago and provides excellent support to her direct reports. She is always approachable and listen their thoughts and concerns. Recently one of direct reports has also become a line manager, thus giving Olaia an additional responsibility of two tier management.
Olaia spent some of her free time with activities organised by Women at Amey and STEM and promotes gender balance within the industry. She is also one of Amey’s carbon champions and making a positive impact to reduce carbon intake by the rail industry.“
“Olaia is a dedicated and industrious Senior Civil Engineer who always provides an excellent service to her clients. This has been demonstrated within the Wales and Borders Core Valley Lines project where she has successfully undertaken the roles of the Design CRE on the Civils foundations AIP design packages, the Design CRE Canton Depot AIP works, and most recently as the Lead Designer for the Dinas Rhondda footbridge detailed design, delivering high quality submissions throughout. She is a highly motivated and organised individual who communicates extremely well with both her design teams, her project management colleagues and her peers on the client side. She will always go the extra mile to resolve the numerous issues that arise on this project and is a pleasure to work with and I’d highly recommend her for a Rail Staff award. Olaia is also an active member of ‘Women at Amey’, where she has engaged with events promoting gender balance and diversity within the Industry.“
“Olaia is a role model engineer and a key member to the civils rail team at Amey. She is highly motivated, passionate and brings an all-around positive impact to the team. Whenever anyone on the team has an issue, she is the go-to person for advice, and she is always willing to help others.
Olaia displays incredible organisation and managerial skills. She is able to work on high pressure deliverables with tight time scales while delivering projects to a high quality, managing her own workload along with various resources. This is seen in her ability to take on tough challenges on projects like Crossrail as well as the complex Wales & Borders project on the Core Valley Lines. Through her work, it is apparent that she is an expert in her field, creating innovative ways of working for designs to make things more efficient. She has great communication skills and is able to work well with people within the civils team as well as other disciplines, smoothening out any friction present.
Olaia goes above and beyond in terms of cultivating junior members of the team, supporting their careers and providing them vital support to achieve their goals. This can also be attributed to her ability empathise and her caring nature to help develop others. She is a line manager and a mentor to a team which is growing in numbers. As a chartered engineer with the ICE, she is acting as a delegated engineer to supervise the development of graduate engineers. In addition to this, she is a STEM ambassador who actively promotes engineering to the younger generation. She is also part of the Women@Amey community in Amey and promotes inclusion within the team. She proactively organises and coordinates various important events benefiting the team such as the annual ICE MDO meetings, student work experiences and STEM events just to name a few. Her contributions have really helped us grow as a team and I hold her in high regards.“
“I took on a very difficult task on Nov 2020 as Civils Responsible Engineer (CRE-D & Civils Project Engineer) in Wales & borders Core Valley lines project, where the contractor and consulting relationship didn’t go well.
I identified the issues very quickly. Olaia was very keen to come under my team and assist me to fix the issues. She exceeds my expectations in many aspects. As an example, she started looked after Civils technical delivery together with resource allocation. This allowed me to cancel lengthy process meetings and free up my team lead time.
She was the backbone me to write a Civils engineering submissions related BIM guidance to CVL. In this process she did trial and error method. This shows me that her commitment to high quality submissions.
When I had bad days in the office due to my own workload, Olaia was the go-to person expressing my feelings. I had been so relieved and get back to my energy levels again after these discussions.
I am immensely proud her work to promote women in engineering and carbon calculations/reductions.“
“I would like to congratulate all the staff involved in the Railstaff Awards on Saturday the 1st November it was a truly excellent event enjoyed by all and extremely well organised.”
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