On June 22, Deborah Sims hands over the CIHT presidency to Neil Johnstone. TP Progress couldn’t let this moment pass without a final interview.

What are your personal highlights from the past 12 months?

It's really difficult genuinely to pick any out because I wouldn’t want to emphasise one region over another. But the main highlight was going out and meeting our members, particularly the young professionals. They just blow me away – we’ve got so many young people who are passionate about what they're doing and they are so ambitious and driven.

What did you expect, if anything, from the presidency? And did it deliver?

 In my time at CIHT, I’ve always looked up to the president as a really eminent person who has a huge amount of knowledge and someone who is just brilliant. And then it's you – and you're just a normal person going about your normal life! The expectation was that something magical would happen to me and I'd become ‘presidential’, but it didn’t – I’ve just remained myself.

Sue Percy reassured me that it was more about my personality and my approach to things that made me stand out from everybody else. And that's the joy of CIHT – we have so much diversity, so I didn't feel the need to do anything different.

I also expected some international travel, which obviously didn’t happen, but I did get to take part in the Hong Kong AGM online!

What surprises were there for you along the way?

The first one was when Storm Arwen hit last November. I was in Wales for a dinner and the storm came in and caused a lot of disruption. There were no trains back from Wales, so we had to hitch a lift back to Birmingham. Another surprise was when I went to Belfast, I said to Karen McShane (from CIHT Northern Ireland), that I'd love to spend a couple of hours birdwatching in Belfast. And she organised a whole day for me, including seeing red kites being fed, which was absolutely mind-blowing. The other surprise was in Exeter, with the South West branch, who had a caricaturist for an evening. I was a bit nervous about this because I haven’t had my caricature drawn before, but I absolutely love it!

Did your experience as a chartered engineer and a lecturer provide the perfect preparation for a president in a pandemic?

Chartered engineers have a wide range of skills around communication, finance and technical understanding – and having those skills really did help me because you move in lots of different areas and talk to people from many parts of the industry. You also have to be able to communicate and understand the issues you are talking about, which is where my experience as a lecturer comes in. I was a bit surprised that, after quite a few of the speeches I gave, I had at least one person come up afterwards to tell me how well I'd done and how well I spoke!

How do you reflect on the theme of professionalism?

Having spoken about it to a lot of people over the past 12 months, I'm even more convinced that professionalism should be the focus of CIHT. It's what we are as a professional body – the clue’s in the name. And, in a world where telling the truth, being credible and checking your sources is not always as important as it should be, we need to differentiate ourselves. We need to be really credible and to be trusted by the public. There are so many ways where, as transportation professionals, we've got to be doing absolutely the best job that we can. That means being fully carbon literate, understanding our specialist areas, giving good advice to clients and getting things right first time when spending public money.

What impact can a female presidency have on female engineers today?

I know from the feedback I've had from members – and talking to committee members in particular – is that it really does make a difference. I've heard from so many young women who were really pleased that we've got another female president. We need to do more on diversity, but that comes back to what we do as professionals. If we're working in communities, we've got to understand those communities and we've got to better represent them.

Did you receive any advice from your predecessor? And do you have any advice for Neil Johnstone?

Everyone I spoke to gave me some key messages. One was to really enjoy it, which I think I have – I’ve loved it, in fact. They also said about being myself and not trying to be something you're not. So that means, for me, going out and chatting to people and being friendly to people. I’ve actually got pages and pages of notes of the advice I was given, which really helped me.

Neil and I have had many chats and I’ve told him pretty much what I was told. There was a change this year, which means the President is more of a ceremonial-type role, which definitely played to my strengths. I know Neil will be able to spend more time going out and engaging with people as much as he can.

One thing I would say is, because there are so many opportunities and invitations that come your way as president, choose what to accept wisely!

Deborah Sims BSc MSc FCIHT CEng PGCertHE FHEA Hon SoRSA was interviewed by John Challen.

CIHT thanks Deborah Sims for her presidency and welcomes Neil Johnstone as president this evening at 5pm BST.