Josh sits down with Mamta Singhal MBE, who found her calling early, taking apart plugs and mechanisms as a child long before she knew the word "engineer."

Inspired by James Dyson and a Tom Hanks film about a toy designer, she set herself a single goal: to engineer the things that make children smile. She studied product design engineering at Glasgow University and the Glasgow School of Art, landed a graduate placement at Dyson, and at 23 was working at Hasbro on Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Action Man.

In this episode, Mamta takes Josh through a career spanning Hasbro, Coca-Cola and Mattel, and into her incoming role as Vice President of the IET. She talks about form and function as inseparable, the importance of company culture over title, and why she's never had a plan B.

The conversation moves into the territory that drives her now: getting more women into engineering and keeping them there, the role of male allies, mentorship as a duty rather than a favour, and her new venture, the Top Percent Club, supporting senior women navigating the altitude at the top of the profession.

Mamta is honest about the failures behind the awards, the Hoover rejection before the Dyson job, the dozens of knockbacks for every success and makes the case that engineering needs less stereotypical engineers, not more of the same.

A genuinely inspiring conversation about purpose, resilience, and leaving a legacy.

What does it actually take to build a career in engineering when the path is anything but straight?In this episode, Josh sits down with Susan Ipri-Brown, immediate past president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, one of the oldest engineering institutions in the world. From a grandfather who never doubted she'd follow him into the profession, to internships at General Motors, to teaching, to leading ASME, to starting her own company, Susan's "squiggly line" is a masterclass in adaptability.We get into the gap between what universities produce and what industry needs, why students underestimate the story they've already built, and how knowing your capabilities, including the ones you don't yet have, changes the way you grow. Susan also makes the case for professional societies as a place to lead before your job lets you, and reflects on what mentorship really looks like across a career.A genuinely transatlantic conversation on workforce development, self-awareness, and why engineering is, at its heart, about possibility.

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Paul is an independent consultant working at the nexus of public and private heat networks, having most recently spent five years at Vattenfall and, before that, a long career at Whitby Bird and Ramboll.His route in started early, a grandfather he knew as an engineer without ever learning what he did, an uncle's stories over slabs of Irn Bru, a laser lab in Liverpool, and a week of work experience on a harbour build that showed him the scale and impact of real infrastructure. A gap-year CAD job became a general engineering degree at Cambridge, which became geotechnics almost by chance when Whitby Bird won the BBC Broadcasting House project, which eventually became energy, and then heat networks, the only thing he does now.In this episode, we explore what a non-linear engineering career actually looks like from the inside why exposure matters more than knowing exactly where you'll end up, how the mentors who gave him space to learn and fail shaped everything, and why he went from "total skeptic" of district heating to total advocate. We talk about the Scotland Heat Map he helped build, the economic case for backing young engineers early, and what it really takes to move from doing the engineering to leading the people who do it. We also get into chartership why he failed the first time, why he deserved to, and what the second attempt taught him, plus his belief that the future of heat lies in coordinated regional energy companies rather than 32 organisations repeating the same lessons.This is an honest conversation for students and early career engineers wondering how a career builds when you stay open to the pivot have a spark, keep feeding it, and be careful not to overfeed it.

Connect with Paul Steen on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsteen

Follow Engineer a Career -

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Website: www.engineeracareer.co.uk