Member Article

North West award winner highlights diversity in Civil Engineering

The Civil Engineering Contractors’ Association North West (CECA North West) announce regional winners at a prestigious award ceremony.

Held at the Midland Hotel in Manchester city centre, the region’s finest civil engineering contractors responsible for infrastructure networks in the transport, energy, water, waste and communications sectors gathered together to celebrate eight outstanding individuals and businesses.

According to a recent report by Engineering UK, only 1 in 8 of those in engineering occupations are women but Royton born Stephanie Curran, who works at Stockport based firm ACS Construction Ltd, made sure women were high on the agenda.

Curran won the Women in Civil Engineering award for her hard work and commitment as part of ACS’s equality values to seek, engage and encourage more female candidates into the engineering industry. Just five years after making a career move from IT into the engineering sector, Stephanie took on new projects including the development of a revolutionary new ID card system which integrates into smartphone technology. This led her to win second place in last year’s CECA Innovation Awards. Since then, she’s also worked across marketing and social media alongside qualifying as an Internal Auditor.

Guy Lawson, Director of CECA North West says: “Stephanie has shown herself to be versatile, innovative and highly motivated. She has dealt with the sector change with enthusiasm and has integrated quickly. She is a positive inspiration to women who would like to join engineering. We need many more to follow in her footsteps.”

One of CECA NW’s top priorities remains to encourage more women to become civil engineers; a more diverse workforce is essential in addressing both skills shortages and growing labour rates.

Other winners at the prestigious ceremony included Toby Hensman of Dukinfield based Chartrange Ltd for ‘Young Professional’, Collaborative Partnership to Cheshire based D Morgan and Lifetime Achiever to Brian Goodacre of Harry Fairclough Construction in Warrington.

A full list of winners from the night

PROJECT UP TO £1 MILLION WINNER: CT CONSTRUCTION

PROJECT BETWEEN £1-5 MILLION WINNER: PP O’CONNOR

PROJECT OVER £5 MILLION WINNER: A E YATES

YOUNG PROFESSIONAL WINNER: T HENSMAN (CHARTRANGE)

WOMAN IN CIVIL ENGINEERING WINNER: S CURRAN (ACS)

COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIP WINNER: D MORGAN

SOCIAL VALUE WINNER: ERIC WRIGHT

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT WINNER: BRIAN GOODACRE (HARRY FAIRCLOUGH)

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jo Leah .