Pursuing Passion to Find a Career With Purpose

When she graduated from school, Jacqui found choosing a career path daunting and decided to put the decision on hold for 12 months, spending the time in a variety of roles to work out what she enjoyed and how she liked to work. At the end of her gap year, she enrolled in a degree in civil and construction engineering.

After graduating, she spent seven years working with consulting companies in Queensland and it was during this time she had her first encounter with Shell. “I was working for a consultancy who were supporting Shell on a project at the time.” Soon after, when she heard about an opening for a civil structural engineer at Shell, she jumped at the opportunity.

Today, Jacqui is the asset support lead at Shell’s QGC business where she works as a business support advisor. This role gives her the opportunity to work with performance data, deliver insights, understand budgets and commercial finance, and learn how various factors align to deliver energy. “At Shell, I have learned new skills that have expanded my development and career, bringing the excitement of solving large and complex challenges that I didn’t have exposure to as a traditional structural engineer,” she says.

While working with Shell as a contractor, however, she realised that she wanted to build a career with the company. “After experiencing Shell’s culture, I realised that working with a global company that influences millions of lives each day can help develop my career while also making progress in the energy transition.”

Learning more about the sector and gaining exposure to the challenges of the energy transition got her interested in going beyond the day-to-day application of her engineering skills. “I realised, at Shell, people can play a bigger part in the challenges that come with the energy transition,” she says.

Jacqui’s shift to a broader career path, she says, was a result of the training programmes Shell offered to develop her career and is part of a culture that fosters collaboration to enable people to learn. “At Shell, I am empowered to ask questions. Colleagues, no matter how experienced, always take time out to collaborate and share their learnings,” she says.

Jacqui also appreciates the opportunity to collaborate with teams outside of Australia. “Working with those teams and integrating across the globe is crucial to our success,” she says, adding, “We share and learn from each other’s experiences, ways of working and best practices.”

Jacqui sees the difference it makes to an employee’s progress, being in an environment that values diversity, equity and inclusion. “Shell helps me feel like I belong at work. When contributing to developing solutions, the culture at Shell has allowed me to grow confidence, which has seen me thrive”. She now tries to find ways to pay it forward. “I am passionate about women participating in STEM, one of the best things we can do is share our career stories with school and university students”, which she has done at local science and careers fairs. “These young people will be at the forefront of the energy transition,” she says.

Jacqui is deeply involved in the work to support Shell to achieve its target to become a net-zero energy business by 2050. “My role is to support our leaders to ensure we meet our energy transition targets and while I do that, I power my progress by building my capabilities and growing my career in the sector.”