Fay Charlett takes advantage of our Career Development Scheme
According to Fay, her career has been “a series of wonderful accidents and fate”. She joined UKAEA in 2016, now she makes a real impact by helping to secure the projects that our teams really want to work on.
Key achievements
Fay’s proudest moment in her career was when she helped to shape and develop the UKAEA Commercial Team. When she joined, Commercial and Business Development were a single department. This was towards the end of 2019, when the teams were busy, growing and needed to exist separately.
Fay then began to lead the newly-formed Commercial Team, developing it into what it is today. “I started leading this new team then and have grown it from two to five in that time as well as the areas of UKAEA we assist with.”
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Role
Head of Commercial
Department
Commercial - Support Services
Joined UKAEA
2016
Qualifications
BTh (Oxon) 2001, Certificate in Business Administration, BTH Construction, HNC Construction, Law for Commercial Management (CBT training)
Fay’s journey so far
Graduating from university
Fay graduated from the University of Oxford in 2001, with a degree in Theology. She didn’t necessarily expect to end up working in this field, but demonstrated transferable skills that made her the perfect candidate for her role.
A step into project management
After moving back to Oxford, Fay started a job as a project manager in construction. It was here that she completed a BTEC and HNC in Construction whilst she was working.
Tendering in nuclear
Building upon her management skills, Fay moved on to tendering in nuclear where she took on a host of responsibilities. She was involved in consultancy, Health Physics and engineering through to decommissioning. She also completed a further qualification within the areas of tendering and proposal management.
Joining UKAEA!
Fay joined UKAEA in 2016 to work within the Business Development and Commercial team, before creating the standalone Commercial Team in 2019.
“UKAEA has allowed me to take everything I have learned from all of my experience and help our people get the projects that they want. Being in and around the industry I saw what UKAEA was doing, and being part of the mission to assist with the energy crisis was so important to me.”
UKAEA allows me to grow both professionally and personally; I feel supported and listened to. I believe that work-life balance is critical for people, working here lets me have that balance so I can bring 100% to everything I do.
Fay Charlett
Head of Commercial
Career development and support
Personal development
Fay has taken part in a variety of personal development courses, including negotiation and influencing people and communications.
Mentoring programme
Fay is also both a mentor and a mentee within our mentoring programme at UKAEA. She feels this programme is crucial for the development of our staff members and is proud to be a part of it.
“Development is critical to all people, especially within a role like mine, where I need to be up to speed on not only my area of specialism but also the strategy of UKAEA and all of the types of technical activities we do on site.”
CPD training course
She has also recently completed a 12-month CPD training course, called “Law for Commercial Managers”, that has been extremely useful in her day-to-day role.
“UKAEA allows me to grow both professionally and personally; I feel supported and listened to. I believe that work-life balance is critical for people, working here lets me have that balance so I can bring 100% to everything Ido.”
Discover our employee benefits to see how we can support you both personally and professionally.
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