From Environment Agency to Global Head of Nuclear
- get into nuclear
- Sep 22, 2021
- 12 min read
Updated: Dec 2, 2022
Juliane Antrobus
Global Head of Nuclear
PA Consulting
Right Swot and Band Girl
I spent my early years living in Manchester before my family moved to Southport to start their own business. So, I grew in Southport going to school at St Patrick’s Primary and then Christ The King Comprehensive Secondary School. Southport is a beautiful part of the country in the North West, on the coast with miles of long sandy beaches. There is not a hill to be seen, which is unfortunate for my husband, who's a keen mountain climber. Nonetheless, it's a beautiful coastal town.
Looking back on things now I see how my parents were quite ambitious as a couple when they set out, probably the best part of 40 years ago, to have their own business, and a hotel was what they wanted. One day I'm going to write a book about growing up in the White Lodge. My Dad, Mum, and I lose many an hour together reflecting on the stories of the hotel and the antics of our guests. But, joking aside, it's where I learned how to work hard and, for my parents, it was a 24/7 job. Not until they'd worked hard enough, could they stop and enjoy holidays and even close the hotel at Christmas. The first 5 to 10 years of the business, they had to work it and give it their all.
Days in the hotel went quickly. I worked as everything from the pot cleaner to changing the beds to serving dinner and breakfast. One day, they had this genius idea of opening a bar to make lots of money. So, they built a bar within the hotel and yeah, I then had to serve in the bar. Luckily for me, my Mum & Dad were more than generous and they used to give me an hourly rate for working in the hotel. I made a fortune in those early years in my piggy bank.
I've always had that kind of hard work ethic. I think it probably comes from both my parents and my time working in the hotel. This work ethic has stayed with me at school and right through to working where some of my colleagues - whom I hold dear and will remain nameless - called me "a right swot”.
I think it was just because I wanted to do well; I was curious, hardworking, and diligent.
My teachers always said that I was middle of the road when I was at primary and then I went to secondary school, and I just seemed to flourish. But really I came into my own later on when I went to university.
Although I liked school, my big thing was music. You have to love my music to love me, which is rather eclectic, as my husband knows. I listen to everything from Country to Classic to Rock. One of my greats is Charlie Pride, who has sadly just died. He was a great Country & Western singer. I have been to the home of Charlie Pride in a place called Sledge, Mississippi, when I was 16 on a road trip around Nashville, Tennessee, New Orleans, and Memphis. Our first road trip as a family to the States.
For about ten years, I played in a brass band, St John's Silver band in Southport. I played the flugelhorn, which is a beautiful instrument. It's played in a lot of jazz orchestras. It's an intense, mellow, beautiful sound, not harsh like a trumpet. I love the fact that being in the band, meant I had a group of friends outside of school and we travelled all over the country competing in national contests.
I’ve played at the Albert Hall, played on TV as a youngster, and played solo in national competitions. So, for those who know the fabulous movie, Brassed Off, that is a pretty accurate replay of my childhood experiences and life in a brass band.
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The World of University
I've always been fascinated by the world around us. Interested in travelling and interested in how we look after the world and the environment in which we live.
When I was at the age to join a university, it was a point in time where industry was having to face the legacy of some of the past and the significant incidents that had happened around the world, in terms of chemical spills, oil and gas spills and the global waste challenge.
Those scenes struck me when I was going through school, and I went down the road of Environmental Science because I felt that I wanted to do something that made a difference to the world that we live in. Plus, I could travel and see the extraordinary world we live in. Doing environmental science helped me understand all of that within an industrial context. Learning to understand the technology to help clean it all up, from the gaseous emissions to liquid effluent to the storage of radioactive waste, really inspired me and made me want to apply my learning in a practical way.
University for me was the whole gambit. I loved my time at university, and it allowed me to go back to my roots in Manchester. In my first year, I lived in Levenshulme, where I was born. I love Manchester to this day. I'm a Mancunian at heart and even though I now live closer to Liverpool, Manchester will always have a place in my heart.
I think when you go to university, you gain the independence that you are thirsting for at that age. The friends you make, the experiences you have, and I was fortunate that I chose a program that allowed me to go overseas for six months during my time at university. I went to Buffalo University in upstate New York to do work on the Great Lakes and those surrounding, from Ontario to Buffalo with a number of excursions to Niagara. I was able to study some of the pollution and what they've been doing on Lake Erie to clean up the legacy of the past. I was so pleased that I had the opportunity to travel as part of my university studies, and it was a terrific experience.
Entering The Real World
At the end of my time at university, I was ready to earn some money. I'd done four years of being at university, sharing a flat and house with everybody. I loved all of that, but I was definitely ready to start my career journey, although I had no idea where it was going to take me……..
We had the graduate circuit come and do the rounds, with the big blue-chip companies coming to talk to us. I had an interim period where I worked for the Environment Agency before I joined a graduate program. I worked at the EA when they started to assign waste and understood where waste was going to & from and its consignment from big chemical companies to small SMEs for treatment, recycling, reuse and/ or disposal. It was great working with the EA to see how that kind of an organisation operates. However, it was only ever a stepping stone. At that time, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), a global organisation were looking specifically for people who had degrees in environmental science to join. New legislation had come in through Integrated Pollution Prevention Control legislation and they needed people to come in and work with them to help them understand how they mitigate their emissions and their impact on the environment.
So, I put myself forward, went through the whole graduate recruitment process, and was successful, which was tremendous. I got to work with Springfield's, a site in Preston where they manufactured the fuel for the, at that point, the Magnox reactors, but also the AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors).
On my first day, I had massive trepidation; but it's a wonderfully welcoming site and still is to this day. They had a very established and mature radiation protection advisor community, and this is where I was posted first. It was great.
There was a lot of learning on the job, but I received incredible support. The graduate programme itself was pretty interesting. I mentioned earlier about working in the hotel when I was younger and actually when you go onto a site like Springfields in a management position and you're going on sites where there’s shift working, and it's very male-dominated, you've got to earn your respect. You don't just turn up on day one and start telling everybody what they've got to do. You’ve got to earn their respect and build relationships at many different levels and with many people. The hotel, in a way, made me more confident because I had to meet and speak to everybody and anybody. My mum and dad always taught me a key value which was to never think that you're better than the man or woman in the street, that advice stayed with me forever. It’s massively important, especially in a working environment. Going on the shifts, working on the shifts, and showing that I was willing to get my sleeves rolled up and get stuck in was quite a defining moment because it showed that I was a real team player.
The Radiation Protection Advisor's role, back in that day, was very much seen as the person who stopped operations. You were the one that stopped operations if anything was going awry. That was hard for me because it wasn't in my DNA to tell people to stop work. I would find a way to work with them, obviously maintaining a safety-first approach, but clearly, there are options to explore so we can also maintain safe operations. Because at the end of the day, we had to manufacture fuel, which keeps the lights on. I went full circle in realising that maybe the role for me wasn't the gamekeeper. It was being part of the team and getting my sleeves rolled up. So I moved to an operations role and worked with the teams on the shifts to manufacture fuel for the reactors. It was probably the best experience I could've ever had.
The Bag Carrier
On my first day at Springfields, I vividly remember a gentleman called Steve Curren, who worked in our uranium accountancy team, who said to me on meeting him, that I was going to work for the chairman of BNFL. This meant absolutely nothing to me, but five years later, I did get a call from our head of HR, who said to me, “Juliane, we'd like to put you forward as the Springfields nomination to go and work for the chairman of BNFL.” It's a bit of a joke in the industry now about being a ‘bag carrier’, but wow, what an opportunity. I didn't think I was in with a chance. I was just pleased even to be nominated and considered in that regard by the Exec of the Springfield's team.
This was an opportunity where you got to work with the senior executive at BNFL. You are there to provide all the board papers and do all the kinds of investigative work before you meet clients or the government or go overseas to prepare the agendas and briefings for the meetings. You get to see the inner workings of an organisation like BNFL and all the internal politics that come with it. It was just such a privilege.
I remember meeting the Chairman of BNFL for interview, a gentleman called Sir Hugh Collum. I went to the great offices of BNFL in London on Buckingham Gate, and we sat in his very plush office. I sat there, enjoyed the moment, but never really thought it would be me. It is the closest experience I had to the interviews on the Apprentice.
Part of the process was to appoint your successor, so my predecessor had down selected me as one of three candidates. I think I was chosen as I was willing to embrace the whole experience in all its glory and by moving to London, enjoying the totality of the experience. On a personal level, I was also in a position to be joined by my husband, well fiancé at that time. I was successful and was appointed in post Mach 2004. We went to London, and it was the best and the most opportunistic thing I've ever put my hand to, absolutely no regrets.
One of the things with those roles is the network that you get access to. I had the privilege of gaining access to some of the greats at the time, people that I would genuinely call leaders of the industry. What that role gave me was, first of all, access to those individuals; I had to be in a position that I built a relationship with every one of them so that I could pick up the phone to them because Sir Hugh would ask me a question and expect me to have the answer. It goes back to what I learned at the hotel, the confidence and ability to connect with people, strike up a rapport, have a conversation and be able to go back with confidence, to tell Sir Hugh, of what's happening so he could be fully briefed.
Because I invested a lot of time building those relationships, it was up to me to choose where I went after the secondment. Give how I was privy to the inner workings of BNFL and how it operated, it was exciting to see the commercial side of the business and this felt far more interesting and glamorous if I am honest. That was why I made the shift from operations into a more business development role.
Life After BNFL
I left BNFL when there was a significant reorganisation of the industry. I decided to step out from the client-side into the supply chain. Nuvia was a company that I'd worked closely with for several years. They were a newcomer then, but they did some incredible work in uranium trading worldwide, decommissioning, and they were looking to grow their business. I wanted to get the hard kind of business development skills and go out and understand how you grow a business from first principles. How you go out, bid, position and win work and then help set up the teams to deliver successfully. It was a very different mentality from my work with BNFL. Then, Nuvia was a contracting organisation, so very different from the blue-chip BNFL. I stayed with Nuvia for the best part of four years and it was a great springboard for me in the world of strategy & business development.
I got my first board position with Nuvia in 2009. At the same time, I had my first son. It was tough; the world wasn't ready for the whole part-time executive role. You're a leader; you need to be visible, and that was tough because I didn't have a family to not be there for them. I asked myself how I wanted to take this forward. Through conversations as part of my day-to-day working, a chance opportunity was made available to me at Atkins through one of the senior leaders I had got to know during my Special Advisor role with BNFL.
Atkins's vision for the business sang to me; this is an organisation that was enlightened and thinking about the future. It just felt right. It was not about the money; it was about getting my life back in a way that I could enjoy my ever-expanding family and be able to shape a great career. They never disappointed me in that. Together, we found a way to support flexible working and for me to remain in an Executive Leadership position as Strategy Director. And I've done this ever since. I'm probably 11 years into flexible working; I'm continuing to drive a career forward. But that's because people trusted me, and they were forward-thinking enough to enable such a balanced approach.
Advice to my younger self
Now that I've got to a position where I'm far more comfortable in myself and my own skin, I realise that it is all about bringing your whole self to work. I didn't for the best part of 20 years. It wasn't until I started working with Atkins that I settled into bringing my whole self. I remember, my then boss said to me, when you look back on your time at Atkins, I want you to know you had fun. You know what, I did. And I continue to do so because I finally understand what happens when you bring your whole self to work and not just the professional swot!
Previously, I had very much come to work and had much success, but if I am honest I did tend to leave Julianne Antrobus the fun one, the rally driver, who plays in a brass band and goes running and has two beautiful children and a great husband at the gate. I wouldn't have talked about those aspects, and I certainly wouldn't bring it into work, but now with time I have learnt the value of bringing my whole self to work and how authentic it can be, so I'd say to my younger self, don't leave half of your self at the gate. When you step over the threshold, bring all of you.
Get Into Nuclear
Juliane Antrobus joined PA Consulting as Global Head of Nuclear last year to lead their nuclear growth strategy. Juliane also sponsors PA's women's network and works with Women in Nuclear on their leadership program. She lives in Southport with her husband, David, or "Mr A", with two children, Oliver and Lucy, who are at primary school.
Juliane is a fantastic example of how you take your transferrable skills, gained even when working in a hotel, with you throughout your career. Head on over to our Career Hub to find out more about the types of jobs available in nuclear and the skills required to land a role. After completing a skills map of your transferrable skills against the positions you are interested in, we can then guide you in upskilling yourself and applying for live nuclear jobs.
Julianne was featured recently on the AWNTY podcast. Click on the link to find more influential career stories, or listen to Julianne below:
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