To celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, we sat down with our Client Relationship Manager Julia Wosztyl to learn more about her experience working within the heat network industry and career pathway.
This year’s theme for International Women’s Day aims to #InspireInclusion asking the question if women aren’t present, we must ask as organisations and individuals “if not, why not?”. To learn more about this year’s campaign please visit: https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Theme
So… Julia! What lead you to career within the heat network industry?
Well I’ve been interested in business from a very young age! I was born in Poland and moved over to the UK when I was 6 years old, my parents soon after started a transport and logistics company which inspired me to go into business. As I’d moved over at a young age my English was obviously better than my parents… so at 16 I started helping them out across all areas of the business. From monitoring emails, learning the accounting side and even taking exams to understand and advise on transport laws and regulations in the UK.
From there I concentrated on studying business right the way through my education as it had always been focus in my life. This lead me to working within account management and taking the role at Sycous!
What are you currently working on?
It’s different depending on the day! My role was new to Sycous back when I started, I’m now a ‘go to’ contact for our clients for any queries or issues they may have, I’ll then work with individual departments across Scheduling, Maintenance and Customer Support to resolve any issues and report back to clients.
With our client reporting process I can work with customers across all areas of their network for example metering and debt, to look to where we can make improvements!
What’s the best bit about your job?
Probably working with so many different people! Like I said each day can be different, working with different clients and residents but also travelling across the country to different schemes.
It’s also been an exciting challenge to learn more about the heat network industry… I’ve always had an interest in sustainability and to be a part of an industry that is constantly evolving is really interesting! Especially being able to see first-hand how our clients systems work and how the housing sector works in general.
How have you found joining the District Heating Divas?
Really inspiring! It’s crazy to learn more about what other women in the industry are working on and shows the bigger picture outside of our own niche area. Energy is mainly a male dominated industry but divas ignores that! Diva’s has really inspired and motivated me in my own career to give me that oomph to go higher!
When you’re not at work, we can usually find you…
I’d say in the cinema or with my dog Amber. She’s a Labrador but absolutely hates waking up… 6am is not for her! Not sure she’d be cut out for the heat network industry!
