Words / Karen McShane, President of the Chartered Institute for Highways and Transportation

My career started with my degree in civil engineering at Queen's University in Belfast. In the late 1980s, I had a couple of placements, one with a contractor building the foundations for our first major city centre shopping centre. We took an old market and converted it into what is now the Castle Court Shopping Centre. My second placement was with our local Roads Authority delivering the design of a new highway, a great introduction into the transport field.

The day after leaving university, I started working for a local consultancy practice called Kirk McClure Morton where I stayed for 22 years until 2011. When I started at KMM, I was handed a set of floppy discs and told that it was some of the DfT's new software for transport analysis. An introduction to computers then started and my role was to install the software and to learn how to use it, as we had just won a job to do some transport analysis. Over the next decade, I built the transportation team in the Belfast office and spent a lot of time dealing with transport assessments for major planning applications and cost benefit analysis for new routes. I was lucky to work with some of our best design teams delivering key infrastructure for the community.

In 2011 I realised that I really wanted to do my own thing. I had other changes going on in my life and to achieve them I really needed to be my own boss, so I left KMM and set up a small consultancy practice in Belfast, which I continue to run to this day.

I really feel that achieving proper training and qualifications is an important part of our journeys. In 1995 I passed my professional exams and became a chartered engineer and since then, I've been heavily involved with STEM, CIHT (which I joined as a student in 1988) and ICE, nationally and locally.

Equality, diversity and inclusion is something that impacts me. It started by getting involved with Women in Engineering: we have a group in Northern Ireland known as #notjustforboys. They have a great facility in Belfast where they take women who want to get into employment, training them in lots of trades and skills.

At this time, no one realised that I had struggled with my identity from the age of three, and one of the reasons that I left in 2011 to set up my own business is I knew that I needed to do something in my own life. After lots of medical and psychological assessments, I opted to transition to the person that I am today.

When I got involved more heavily in CIHT, I wanted to join the EDI panel and try to make a difference, trying to educate people on the benefits that a diverse workforce can bring. This is supported by research that shows companies with a more diverse board are the ones that perform best, and those with the least diverse board are the ones at the bottom quartile of company performance.

In my year in office, I am very much picking up the climate action agenda. One of the key issues is integrating land use, planning and transport, looking at 15-minute cities and how we ensure that we can live, work and play in our town centres, minimising the need for us to travel. We can't cut travel out entirely, but if we can start looking at our local development plans and coordinating how we link all these things together, we’ll have a greater opportunity to solve the climate crisis.