Robyn Wilkinson Work Experience Placement

Last week, we welcomed 17-year-old Robyn Wilkinson on a work experience placement from West Kirby Grammar School for Girls.

Robyn, who’s a year away from sitting her Maths, Physics and Chemistry A levels, is interested in studying engineering at university, with a particular interest in renewable technology.

Robyn spent her time with us working on a diverse range of projects from planning, designing and costing a Solar PV system for her own school, to working alongside the estimation and engineering teams to see how decarbonisation projects, replacing gas boilers with heat pumps, are designed costed and then delivered.

We were all really impressed with how quickly she fitted in with the rest of the team and how quickly she got to grips with the software we use to design Solar PV arrays and calculate how quickly they payback the investment in electricity bill savings.

We spoke to Robyn towards the end of her week to see how she’d got on.

“It’s been a really interesting week and I’ve learnt a lot about the industry and it’s really clarified my thinking on what I want to do both at university and beyond. I really want to make a difference and I see renewables as my way of doing this. As one of the team here said “No one is getting to net zero without engineers”.

I wanted to see what engineers actually do and how a busy engineering office works. It’s really opened my eyes to the opportunities that working as an engineer in renewables can allow me. I can see my career taking me around the world on renewable schemes in Iceland, Japan, Hawaii and even Antarctica. I have loved working with the team to understand some of calculations and seeing the effect quite small changes make to outputs and efficiencies.

Our generation are going to have to oversee and deliver some massive changes to the way the grid works and is powered. I’d love to be working in that and leading the change.”