Sara Penrose, MIChemE CEng
Directors and Founder, Sara Penrose Ltd
When I was younger I was fascinated by how you could take things apart, study them and put them back together. (I blame my Dad tinkering around with his old lawnmower in the shed!) This set me on the path to having an engineering career, which would allow me to be curious, explore, discover, and solve.
I have gained over 20yrs experience as a Chartered Chemical Engineer. I focused on plant optimisation, project management, plant management, and risk assessment. I have worked in the food, resin, chemical and nuclear industries.
As my journey has progressed, I have learnt many techniques in critical thinking, lateral thinking and problem solving that formed the basis for my experience and how they can maximise productivity, efficiency, safety and quality.
As part of my role, I gained valuable experience as a trainer for, new plant operation, team development, HAZOP and ERP systems. I am also a mentor for IChemE, for fellow chemical engineers as they progress their own careers through to obtaining chartership.
I have always valued the fusion of creativity and process. It has enabled me to innovate and solve many design and operation problems. So often this value is not realised in the workplace, people are under-utilised and siloed into roles that only encourage "we have always done it like this" and "no time to reinvent the wheel". Not enough space to ask questions and properly understand information. It was this that drove my desire to maximise the value of people through development training.
So in 2018 I co-founded Sara Penrose Limited.