From Business Management to Nuclear: What Nadia Kanyike's Route Says About Who Engineering Is For

Most engineers will tell you they always loved taking things apart. Nadia Kanyike's route in was different. She came to the sector through a business management degree and a year in industry, and now works as a planning engineer on major UK nuclear programmes, including Hinkley Point C. On the latest Engineering Talent Podcast, she talks to host Fayon Dixon about a career that has been anything but linear, and why that should matter to anyone who has quietly counted themselves out.

She is candid about the cost of being the only Black woman in the room, three years in and still yet to see a Black woman in a senior role in the places she has worked. She describes working twice as hard to prove she belonged, and the particular fear of speaking up and being cast as the "problematic" one. Her conclusion is not that companies need more faces on their posters. It is that the systems people walk into have to change, or you are simply bringing someone new into a broken one.

That gives you a sharper question if you are job hunting. Not "does this employer look diverse", but "once I am through the door, will I be supported to stay, and is there room for me to get something wrong". As she puts it, representation is "not about what people tell you. It's about what they show you".

On the recognition she has picked up, including from Women in Nuclear UK, she is refreshingly unsentimental. It is not "a nice trophy", she says, it is "data". Proof that she was not imagining her own competence.

Away from the day job she is a property founder, a frontline care worker supporting people through mental health crises, a mentor and a trustee, and is working towards building a STEM school in Uganda, her parents' home country. The thread running through all of it is the episode's title, Holding the Door Open.

Her advice for anyone hesitating is plain: "everything is teachable, but you need to put yourself forward to be taught".

Watch the full episode here:

The Engineering Talent Podcast is hosted by Fayon Dixon and powered by EqualEngineers.