Judy Turnbull is Bureau Veritas Pacific Region's Consultant Metallurgist based in Cardiff, NSW. As part of Women in Engineering Day, Bureau Veritas would like to share her career journey especially to aspiring engineers.
What inspired you to pursue a career in Engineering?
I learnt what metallurgy was when I was in year 8 or 9 in high school. Because it involved science, engineering and mathematics I wanted to know more and the more I learnt, the more I knew this was what I wanted to do.
Could you talk us through your career journey?
The end of my career is closer than the start, so not only has the journey been a long and varied one, it started during a time when discrimination against women in the workforce was acceptable. The challenges I faced at university and in obtaining and then during my traineeship were difficult, but they didn’t stop me. My first role as a trainee was in the quality control lab and included simple metallurgical failure investigation. I found my dream job.
After leaving university, I moved a number of times, and each move took me to a city with little opportunity to work as a metallurgist, so I worked in various but interesting engineering roles including a concrete batch plant, an international oil company and oil and gas pipeline inspection. I eventually moved into the information technology field where I started as a software developer and ended as a Director of IT.
Almost seven years ago I had the opportunity to move back to my original career choice (and dream job) when I was offered a position in Bureau Veritas as a Failure Investigation Metallurgist.
How do you ‘Leave Your Mark’ here at Bureau Veritas?
My role is a consultant, so I work with a number of clients across a range of industries. When a client contacts me directly to ask a question about work already completed, about a new failure to investigate or simply to talk about metallurgy and materials engineering , it indicates trust. To create a sense of trust in our capabilities and quality of our investigative work is a good “mark” to leave.
What is the most interesting thing about your role?
I get to work in a field I love. The failed components can have interesting backgrounds or origins – for example, from a jet or an ocean racing yacht or the biggest off road haul truck – or the failure can be something we have never seen before. Each failure is different. I get to be an investigative metallurgist every day. How good is that!
What advice would you give to someone joining Bureau Veritas?
We are a large company, offering services across a huge variety of fields and industries in many countries. Get to know more about the company and the people in it. You never know who you might meet or where it might take you.