Maryam Alturabi has become the second female outage manager in FieldCore’s Middle East and Africa (MEA) region – and one of seven FieldCore women employed in this position globally.
Maryam is now responsible for event management activities, including pre-planning, execution and closure of outages in her home country, Bahrain.
Maryam, who holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Bahrain, began her FieldCore career in 2018 as Mechanical Gas Turbine Technical Field Adviser, implementing outages as part of diverse, multinational field services teams across the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
Taher Abujoudeh, Region GM for FieldCore MEA, says diversity and inclusion in the workplace is not a numbers game. According to him, in the current numbers-driven economy, leaders may sometimes easily think of diversity and inclusion as simply another target to meet.
Taher adds that due to complexities historically associated with a career in field services (as well as socio-cultural restrictions in some countries especially in the Middle East and Africa), the talent pool from which female engineers and technicians could be sourced had been relatively small compared to that of their male counterparts. He says there is no shying away from the fact that the number of females in field services may seem inadequate – but he says the good news is the clear uptick in graduates who are progressively expanding the pipeline of capable and empowered female field employees.
“Diversity and inclusion are about more than merely gender,” he says. “It starts at grassroots… with a company’s values, with its blueprint which defines that company’s DNA. It unites a fully integrated business approach, ethical management, performance-based appointments, and real empowerment of all employees. At the very least, it requires a culture and a way of working that nurtures an environment where diversity and inclusion are the norm, not merely a key performance indicator to be ticked off.”
While professional development is an integral component of FieldCore’s people strategy, also underpinning the company’s blueprint is four core values of which “inclusion” is one (safety, integrity and quality the others). These elements, along with other things, fuel one of FieldCore’s outputs namely “empowering the people who power the world”.
In 2021, Maryam was nominated to serve as a Council Member of MEA region’s Field Engineers’ Council – the voice of FEs and their link to management and leadership.
Over the years, she has passionately honed her field engineering skills while working on a variety of different GE power generation units at customers’ power plants across the Middle East. One such unit is the latest 9HA – GE’s flagship gas turbine and one of the industry leaders in operational flexibility, sheer power and record-breaking efficiency.
More recently, Maryam led FieldCore’s all-female field engineer-led crew who completed an advanced hot gas path upgrade of two 9F.03 gas turbines at the GESAT facility in Saudi Arabia. These GE heavy-duty gas turbines were shipped to Bangladesh where they will power an upcoming 718 MW combined-cycle gas power plant.
Yasser Elhifnawi, Service Director for Gulf and Saudi Arabia sub-region, says Maryam’s “well-deserved promotion is a brilliant example of the career growth possibilities in field services in our region (and beyond), and simultaneously signals how FieldCore embraces one of the cornerstones of our foundation, namely Inclusion – a core value defined in our strategic blueprint.”
He says it goes further though. It represents a workplace environment free of bias in which fair and equal opportunities are available to everyone.
SOME OF FIELDCORE MEA’S FEMALE OFFICE AND FIELD SERVICES COLLEAGUES REPRESENTED IN THIS CARICATURE AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF FIELDCORE’S BLUEPRINT WHICH EMBRACES THE COMPANY’S FOUR CORE VALUES – SAFETY, INTEGRITY, QUALITY AND INCLUSION.
