Anna Torkington

"Anna is an Aerospace Engineer, designing aircraft for the pioneering aerospace company Airbus.The ‘Trainer’ and ‘Manager’ types fit very well with Anna’s work because she needs to be diplomatic and conscientious to help her team to design the aircraft. With her skills, she can motivate her team and explain her ideas to them. She also needs to write quite a lot of reports and presentations – being a collaborative person and the ‘Communicator’ type helps her to do this well."

"Anna is an Aerospace Engineer, designing aircraft for the pioneering aerospace company Airbus.The aircraft that Airbus designs are very complicated, so Anna only works on one part of the design, calculating with computer simulations how strong each aircraft needs to be. Sometimes, she leads a team of engineers to design the aircraft and she helps them make decisions and give the right data to other teams so that the whole aircraft can be designed properly. On a normal workday, Anna starts by checking if any questions have arrived by email and replies with the answers. Often, she has phone calls and meetings because designing the aircraft involves lots of different people with a large range of knowledge. She phones people in her team who work in a different location, and checks if they have all the data and information they need to do the designing. If they do need something, Anna will look for the information or contact other people to get it.Anna enjoys the feeling that hundreds of people have worked together to make an aircraft and she likes helping Airbus to make aircraft more efficient so that people can still be connected around the world to family and friends with less impact on the environment. Anna has worked on an aircraft design from the very start to the end over 4 years and she went to France to see it fly for the very first time. She was really excited to see it lift off the ground knowing that she had helped to make that happen!"

"Normally people become engineers because they like Maths but, in fact, Anna used to hate Maths when she was in primary school! Then one day she remembers it suddenly started to become clearer, probably because someone explained a method a different way that made a lot more sense to her brain. Even after that, Maths was not easy for her and she has had to work hard to do well at it. She decided to take Maths, Physics at A-Level because she was interested in space thanks to her big brother. In Physics you get to study space, and Maths is helpful for studying Physics. She also took Biology because she loves animals and the natural world, and likes to understand how people work inside.When she decided she wanted to go to university, she chose Aeronautical Engineering because the space and aircraft topics felt like exciting things she would like to work in as a job. During university, she had actually enjoyed the aircraft design topics more than the space topics so she looked for jobs in aircraft design, and found one in Airbus. They seemed like the best company for her so she accepted the job offer with a starting salary of £21,500 pa. As Anna is now a Chartered Engineer, she could find herself earning as much as £48,000 pa."

"Anna’s most recent hobby is singing in the Airbus choir! She also likes to do a lot of sports, and tennis is her main sport which she plays all year round... even in winter! She also enjoys running and badminton and she cycles to work most days so she gets some exercise on the way to work. Her other hobbies are reading, baking and anything arty – she loves to grab some scissors, paper, pens and draw or create something.There are plenty of chances for Anna to travel with work, as Airbus has sites in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, India and USA. Teams are often made up of people from many different countries so to make sure they all understand things the same way, she visits people on other sites and they come to visit the UK too.Airbus is a very large company with lots of different types of job and many chances for progression. Anna wants to make aviation greener for the planet. She says it’s important that we take action to reduce our impact on the environment, so she would like to work on aircraft projects which will help to do that."