"Engineering offers so many different possibilities and all these roles are absolutely achievable for women."

Helen Ali has built an excellent career in engineering and that is principally down to her own talent and hard work, of course.

But she admits that she was also fortunate to benefit from another crucial ingredient - the right guidance and encouragement early on.

Helen harboured a passion for engineering, sparked by her dad who worked at Rolls Royce, from a young age. That passion was nurtured during an apprenticeship at Jaguar Land Rover where she went on to spend 17 years. She then work for NIO and Polestar before, in 2023, joining Tata Motors Design Tech Centre.

Helen is now Head of Vehicle Architecture at TMDTC, based at the National Automotive Innovation Centre at Warwick University. She is in the midst of a fascinating and fulfilling career, with much more still to come but that career would probably never have taken flight without the right support from family and colleagues at the start.

The historic imbalance between women and men employed in engineering owes much to stereotypes promoted by education and careers advisors and the media. Thankfully, those stereotypes are less prevalent now…and Helen can vouch for the power of enlightened advice and direction.

“I was fortunate that when I spoke with my School’s Careers Advisor about going into engineering, he didn’t question why. He was nothing but supportive and helped me look into different apprenticeship options. Not once did he say ‘But that’s not for women.’ If he had, I may have questioned or doubted myself.

“During my apprenticeship and early work years, I was really lucky to have some great mentors, both male and female. They didn’t view me as a female, they viewed me as an engineer. I’m just a woman who happens to be an engineer.

"It's about having good role models, not necessarily females. It can be a really inspiring male who just wants to work with great people and collaborate together.

“When I started out I was in the minority, often being the only female in the room but thing are changing. We have a way to go yet and there is still a stigma attached to engineering only being for males but there are definitely more women getting into engineering now.”

Helen is happy to endorse Warwickshire County Council’s “Warwickshire Women in Engineering 2025” campaign and would encourage all women considering their career direction to include that sector in their thoughts.

“There are so many different strands to engineering,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be mechanical. If you are interested in sound and music you could go into NVH as there are new developments all the time around sound quality and in-vehicle technology, especially with the lack of engine noise from an electric vehicle.

“If your interest is software and computers,  there are all sorts of evolutions with virtual reality and user experiences. There are different attributes like off-roading, Aerodynamics and efficiency, and if you like the people side, you could go into ergonomics, how people interact with their vehicles, which is a big part of what I do. Can the driver see everything? Can they reach everything? Is it well designed for different genders and people of different heights?

“You can be at a screen doing CAD or in the workshop doing a more hands on role. There’s design, manufacturing, components, electrical -  engineering offers so many different possibilities and all these roles are absolutely achievable for women.

“It’s up to us as an industry to try to get that message out as widely as possible, to students, schools and also parents. We need to attract people at a young age because often you don’t realise what it’s all about until you get in the workplace so we need to make those introductions. Work experience placements within industry are the best way to do this and more companies need to support this.”