She also became heavily
involved with the quality
side, attaining her green
and the black belts. This
culminated in a promotion
to lead engineer in the
electrical quality team,
working as a ‘black belt’
working on problemsolving
for the whole
electrical department.
a car person. I don’t love cars,
but I know that sound, music
and acoustics within the
Another promotion followed to
car are going to be
very important areas
within cars and that’s
the area I wanted
manager of the Product Engineering
Quality team. “I’d gone from the
audio team, to the electrical team to
the entire vehicle team,” she says.
Recently, she started a completely
new role as Software Change
Robustness Manager.
This variety and necessary
adaptability is something she
relishes about being an engineer. She
says: “I’ve always enjoyed learning
new things. I’d hate to do a job where
you work and work for years to learn
how to do something and then it’s
always doing the same thing and
you’re always the same for the rest
of your professional life. Oh, my
god! That sounds horrendous to me,
because literally your job on the first
day is the same as your job the day
you retire.”
In engineering, she says: “Because
you’re engineering new projects all
the time, your job is going to change
constantly, and you have to be able to
adapt. So, a lot of what I’ve learned in
terms of the problem solving is broad
and adaptable. You learn to be a
good problem-solver and that’s a skill
you can apply to almost any project.
You can work in any company, any
industry.”
To say Murphy’s time with Jaguar
Land Rover has been a success would
be something of an understatement.
Since joining in 2012 she has been
made IET Young Woman Engineer of
the Year in 2015; the Royal Academy
of Engineering’s Engineer of the
Year in the same year; was listed as
one of The Daily Telegraph’s Top 50
Women in Engineering in 2017 and
was Design Engineer of the Year at
the British Engineering
Excellence
Awards in
2018.
She embraces
her role as an
ambassador for her
profession – especially
hoping to bring other young
women into it. She says: “I
was one of just two women
on my course. We had some
open days coming up and
I volunteered to host them.
I really wanted to show
people what was so good
about this degree. Many of
the girls who were applying were so
pleased to have a girl to show them
round because they’d assumed it
would be completely male.”
She believes that one of the
biggest obstacles in getting young
women into engineering is that they
fear that they’ll be the only girl there
and that they’ll be treated differently.
“I think the lightbulb went off when I
was doing the tours at the university,”
she says. “It wasn’t even the girls;
it was their parents saying ‘Should
she be doing engineering? It’ll be
so male dominated. She should do
maths instead.’ And if your parents
are saying that, what chance do you
have?”
Murphy is careful, however, to
avoid being pigeonholed by her
gender. “I never want to walk into
a school or a room and say ‘I’m a
woman engineer’. I just want to go in
and say ‘I’m an engineer, this is my
job and it’s really exciting!’ and not
mention the woman thing at all.
Recently, Murphy has taken on a
new role at Jaguar Land Rover which
concentrates more on the electrical
side of vehicles. She says: “I have
an electrical background and then
I moved to the vehicle engineering
department. Now, electrical is
growing so much and so quickly in
the automotive sector. And this brings
with it problems, especially with
software, since the difficulty is how
we manage and maintain software
throughout the vehicle’s life. There
are so many elements to the car, all of
which need to talk to each other and
depend on each other. My role will be
looking at software complexity and
management in the field.”
This new role will not stop her
activities promoting engineering as
a career, however. “I think it’s great
experience and it’s easy to make a
big difference by doing just a little
bit,” she says. !
“I told
them ‘I’m not
to work in”
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