“Ever since I was a small girl, I’ve been interested in how things work,” says Amy, Infotainment and Connected Car Lead Engineer at JLR. “I used to pull things apart and that got me into trouble. I didn’t choose toys because they were fun. I chose them because I was fascinated how they worked.”
Rather than playing with her Polly Pocket Dream House, she’d disassemble it. Rather than whooshing her Hot Wheels toy cars across the kitchen floor, she’d pull them apart. “My dad wasn’t pleased. But my mother pointed out that it showed curiosity, which was a good thing.” When Amy was bigger, she was able not only to disassemble her toys; she could put them back together again. Her parents also bought Lego and Meccano sets – perfect for a child who likes to take apart and to build. Lego, especially, became a passion.
“My mum was highly intelligent and a member of Mensa. But she never got the opportunities. She always told me that I could do anything I wanted. There were never boy things or girl things. My dad was also a big do-er. He was always making things and repairing things.”
At Salford University Amy studied acoustics – the physics of sound – inspired by a deep love of music. In her placement year she worked as a service engineer to fix microphones, amps, and speakers etc.
As a child, Amy also enjoyed theatre, including performing. “In the back of my mind, I thought I’d do some kind of theatre sound engineering. Then someone from JLR came to our university and said they needed acoustics people. The choice was Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) –that’s stopping noise getting into the cabin – or infotainment, making noise to inform and entertain users. I applied. There were 270 places and about 20,000 applicants. I hoped for the best. I went through the various interviews, tests and assessments and got a call, to say congratulations. Did I want infotainment or NVH? I chose making the noise.”
Amy joined JLR in 2013 and can’t speak highly enough of the graduate scheme – “it was brilliant”. She has been in infotainment ever since. “That’s not complacency. I found something I really like doing.” Amy started working on the Range Rover Evoque before moving onto the new Defender in 2015. That was the first programme she worked on from start to finish. She now works on JLR’s newest infotainment programme, including user experience and HMI (human-machine interface).
“Defender was a fascinating programme. It was the most advanced infotainment and HMI system JLR had ever done and which subsequently would go into other JLR vehicles.”
Initially Amy, as a junior, was learning from senior colleagues. Now she is designing screens and is responsible for large parts of the HMI. She is Infotainment and Connected Car PAT (Programme Attribute Team) Leader. “Every day, I still defer to people and ask advice. Equally, people ask me. That’s how teams work.”
As a female engineer in a male-dominated world, Amy says: “I’ve mostly had very good experiences. Things have also got better in the past three or four years. There’s been a much bigger push from the whole business on diversity and inclusion. Most of my HMI team are women.”
“There has thankfully been an increase in women getting into engineering. When I was at school doing physics, of my dozen classmates I was the only female. At Salford, I was the only woman in the whole country to graduate with that degree that year.”
Now a successful engineer, Amy hasn’t lost her passion for Lego. As proof, she shows an orchid, other flowers, a Christmas tree, a bonsai tree, a Defender and a Jaguar – all made from those plastic bricks.
