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A move from HR to engineering is unusual, but Iain Brumpton made it successfully. After serving as Head of People for Zurich Insurance, he became Head of Zurich Engineering last year. 'More people should do it,' he says.
‘It came down to leadership traits’
Brumpton was working under Steve Collinson, Chief HR Officer at Zurich UK as one of a group of Heads of HR. “We had a development plan in place based mainly around transferrable leadership skills,” he says.
While the development was not focused on a specific role, as soon as the engineering role came up, it was a natural fit. After a leadership skills match it appeared that Brumpton was a credible candidate. He put his name into the hat and completed a round of assessments and interviews, and duly landed the role. “I’m not an engineer!” he laughs but what he could offer was the expertise of having led large programmes of work and working within commercial roles.
His feet have been firmly planted in the engineering hub for just over a year now and he has, by his own admission, ‘fallen in love’ with it. The reality is that he says the two hats are not so dissimilar. “I’m mobilising groups of people and helping them to optimise their performance – ultimately making sure that the team is delivering in line with what’s needed for great outcomes,” he says.
We want to work on overcoming the challenges and simplifying it down to a very simply narrative that all the engineering team can get behind
“When the role was introduced to me – one thing that the leadership team said was that they already had 700 engineers in the team and they didn’t need another one,” he says. What they did want was someone to take the business forward to the next stage. “My job is to release the passion of those engineers to do a great job,” Brumpton says.
To achieve that he has immersed himself in the day to day by sitting alongside engineers to find out what the realities are. Brumpton happily admits that it’s a challenging environment, particularly as most of the roles operate remotely and it’s a highly competitive marketplace so the Zurich engineers need to not only be the best but also be abreast of all the latest methodologies.
'The story is key’
A key project that Brumpton is working on is simplifying the story so everyone can get behind it, “We want to work on overcoming the challenges and simplifying it down to a very simply narrative that all the engineering team can get behind,” he explains. While the strategy is admirable the reality is that there are many different specialisms within the Zurich engineering body making the plan harder to execute.
“We have highly qualified engineers across disciplines including lifts/cranes, pressure systems, and a number of wider specialties. The Engineers have great adaptability and could be inspecting a conveyor belt at one of the UK’s leading airports one day and a chair hoist in a care home the next day,” he says. “I’ve been working on the messaging so whatever role you perform in engineering you can understand the overarching goal and how to deliver to customers.”
