Powerful Women at SSE: Christianna

I’m Christianna and joined SSE in 2007 as a Sales Process Coordinator in our Perth office. It was a bit of a roundabout way to get to SSE – I studied Marketing at Edinburgh University and from there joined a networking company. It was great fun and I actually moved up to Perth with them. It was quite a small company, and I started to look for opportunities and found one at SSE.

Within six months of moving to SSE I had changed role to join a new research team that was looking into the future. We basically became an internal consultancy looking at energy issues from an SSE perspective. One of the first projects I worked on was on electric vehicles. At that time there were no production EVs, and Tesla was just a concept. So that was interesting work – forecasting the demand and what we’d need to do to provide the power for chargers. It was all about the future of energy and I really enjoyed it.

Then I went into R&D working on the first offshore wind test centre and eventually was part of the team that enabled the Beatrice offshore wind farm. Because of my experience in research and analysis, I was asked to join a team working on an investigation into strategy and pricing in the energy market. It was meant to be short term but lasted three years. By which time my old job didn’t exist anymore and, at the time the Transmission business was looking at future energy, so I applied for a role in transmission.

I delivered new Energy Scenarios and a Sustainability Strategy for Transmission that moved us from being the poorest performer to the leading position of the three UK Transmission companies. In 2019 a new role was created on the Executive Committee and I was promoted to the role. I’ve been doing this role for the last three years. It keeps growing and changing which I love.

We have management development programmes here, but equally as important has been the guidance and mentoring from leaders who have been hugely supportive. There are many good female role models here, and I’ve seen some really good examples of where you can get to if that’s what your ambition is.

SSE is a great place to work, and our Net Zero approach is something that matters to me and can be seen all across the business. If you are looking for a place to build a career, you can do that in SSE.

"SSE is a great place to work, and our Net Zero approach is something that matters to me and can be seen all across the business. If you are looking for a place to build a career, you can do that in SSE."