Working around the world has taught Vivienne Roberts the path to ultimate job satisfaction can be a long and winding educational journey, writes Gavin Dennett.
A person’s career is an ongoing path of learning, lessons and enlightenment, often with more questions asked than answers in the quest to discover what an individual truly wants from their vocation. It can be a long and fascinating voyage that faces many forks in the road.
For Vivienne Roberts, this journey has included studying mechanical engineering in her native South Africa, moving to London and back, and then landing in Queensland, working as state leader for Neoen’s development team.
Throughout her career, she has sought fulfilment and is driven by the desire to make a difference.
“I am from Cape Town, South Africa, and studied mechanical engineering but was really confused by the studies,” says Roberts. “I struggled through my studies like a fish out of water in engineering.
“All my contemporaries were going into maintenance jobs, such as working in car manufacturing lines, but I didn’t see myself doing that so I went to London and worked for a recruiter who sponsored my management accounting studies.
“I worked as an accountant over there for a couple of years and that balanced out some gaps I didn’t get in engineering.
“Then I returned to South Africa, but didn’t want to work as an accountant anymore. To be honest, I was feeling a bit lost.”
That’s when the energy sector came calling.
“I took some time to think about where I wanted to work and could make an impact, and I landed in the energy sector,” says Roberts.
“I got a job with the City of Cape Town in their energy and climate change unit. It was a very small and strategic unit – only four people at the time – looking at rolling out projects in council operations, behavioural change across the greater city, and long-term energy planning to improve resilience within the Cape Town energy sector.
“Those projects were quite small-scale with a lot of energy efficiency work, and I was dying to get my hands on a large-scale renewable project.
“I got a job with Arup in Cape Town and was doing lender’s technical advisory, owner’s engineer and energy consulting work on mainly large-scale solar projects under the renewable energy program that was in full flight at the time in South Africa.”
In 2016, Roberts made the move to Australia, taking a position with engineering professional services firm WSP, before making the move to renewable energy company Neoen.
“My husband is from Australia so we moved here, had a baby and I started working for WSP in 2017 doing energy consulting work,” she says.
“I joined Neoen in November 2020 and now I head up the Queensland development team.
“It is an exciting place to work. The development team is well supported to come up with ideas and follow through on them.
“Queensland is getting a lot of focus now with the release of the Energy and Jobs Plan, and there is a lot of momentum building for renewables and storage in the state, which is quite exciting.
“We have some solid projects making their way through the development pipelines.”
Two of these Queensland projects are currently under construction: Kaban Green Power Hub wind farm on the Atherton Tablelands, near Cairns, and Western Downs Green Power Hub solar farm, near Chinchilla, 300km northwest of Brisbane.
“Kaban is 157MW, which is not enormous, but the wind turbines are huge,” says Roberts.
“There are 28 turbines making that 157MW so they are the biggest in Australia, for now at least.
“Our two projects under construction are contracted to a government-owned corporation, CleanCo, and our relationship with the state through those engagements is strong.
“We have the support of the Queensland Government and we find it a welcoming place to be.”
From her experience in the clean energy sector, Roberts believes there are more women seeking work in renewables compared to other energy sectors.
“My anecdotal experience is there are more women interested in this sector than perhaps comparable sectors such as oil and gas,” she says.
“There are women from all backgrounds who have enormous ability to add value in clean energy.
“We want to see more women in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics]. From my experience studying engineering, a lot of what I was struggling with was to do with how I felt being a woman in engineering, trying to look at how welcomed women are in STEM and seeing the drop off in how many women are studying STEM and how many actually end up working in STEM fields.
“There are all sorts of roles that need to be filled, and so many could be by women. There are few roles out there that are gender specific.
“I was talking to somebody at the Kaban construction site who was saying some of the best dump truck drivers on that site are women. You can’t imagine a more male role and yet women are perfectly capable of doing it and excelling at it.
“All the way to senior executive roles, there is value in having women represented across the clean energy sector.
“It took me a long time to figure out you don’t need to be hyper-technical in an engineering role.
“There are generalist engineering roles out there; being the bridge between the very technical and the non-technical is an important function.
“It’s OK to not be diving into massively technical areas.”