Angie Jones’s Career Story – 36-yrs of Personal & Professional Growth: From Civil Designer to Constructor of a Fusion Reactor

Abstract

This Graduate Seminar series will feature Angie Jones sharing her career story as an engineering graduate who started on a design board doing civil design work for sewer upgrades and mine permits in the days before CAD when drafting was done by hand. This led to an opportunity to work on a consortium investigating radioactive underground storage tanks and in turn, led to working as a feasibility engineer evaluating options to clean up the U.S. legacy nuclear waste sites on the Oak Ridge Reservation. This required further field investigations managing large crews to put theoretical work into practice which was another new challenge and learning curve. Angie then embarked on a $12m remediation project - the first PM job where she discovered her passion for consensus management. This led to 10-yrs of working for a small business assembling construction crews, material, and equipment to implement the site restoration designs as an output of these investigations.

As the desire to lead larger, more complex projects she moved back to Wood where she took on a regional role in the construction business, was involved in office startups and managing large-scale demolition programmes. Jones progressed to Global Functional Construction leader with focus on large construction jobs, mainly for the U. S. Air Force. She then embraced a role running the internal Academy focusing on developing our leaders and making learning more accessible to all through eLearning. Following this, it was time to lead first-of-a-kind projects first constructing a 'space fence' that included satellite facilities on Kwajalein Atoll and later the Full-scale Fusion test reactor which saw her relocate to France - something she viewed as a leap of faith as it an international team responsible for managing $2bn in construction for the ITER Organization made up of 35 nations.

Jones will share the details of her story above from design board in Knoxville, Tennessee to Project Director for constructing a fusion reactor in Provence, France in pictures, videos, and learnings along the way to help those in attendance to see the possibilities for their careers.  She will share the importance to give back to your industry through technical conferences, advisory boards, and community.

Bio

Jones' career has involved operational roles requiring opening office, building the execution team, managing new country entry plan, creating new tools/ process, developing strategic plans, creating tactical customer plans and the normal P&L responsibilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, etc.

Jones has held global functional roles for Construction Management, Project Delivery and was President of the AMEC Academy for leadership and development.  She contributed to the design & delivery of the Project Delivery Programme to improve delivery execution.

Jones holds a Master of Engineering degree and is a US licensed professional engineer.  She is also a qualified Licensed Contractor.

Jones is also active internationally, serving in key roles on the Board of Directors and Advisory Panels.