Margaret Gildea OBE

The winner

This year Margaret Gildea OBE has been selected as the winner of this special discretionary award. Until recently she was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Rolls-Royce, with accountability for HR strategy and implementation in the Operations part of the business, employment policy for the UK and global learning delivery. Margaret now provides consultancy services to Rolls-Royce on education and skills, and is on the Board of the Science, Engineering and manufacturing Technologies (Semta) sector skills council.

Jointly  taking responsibility for delivering success. She currently acts as a mentor to several women who work part time, offering personal guidance and support in the development of their career aspirations. Through her work with the sector skills council Margaret has passionately
championed the engineering diploma, encouraging young people from diverse backgrounds to consider engineering as potential career. She has also worked extensively with various government departments to promote skills development. Margaret’s awareness of the different ways in which talent manifests itself, started at an early age; “One of the key lessons I learnt around talent, came not long after I joined Rolls-Royce” says Margaret. “I was working
in the employee relations team and offered to take the entrant test for apprentices. I had a degree from Cambridge, but I failed the test spectacularly. It really opened my
eyes and made me understand how many different ways there are to be clever”.  Margaret has an OBE for services to business and has also been awarded an honorary  apprenticeship for her work around skills promotion. Her career in HR spans over thirty years and during this time she has consistently shown a keen dedication to nurturing diverse talent. She has proved herself to be an outstanding champion of the business benefits of creating inclusive workplaces and has been actively involved in many ground breaking HR initiatives which have had unlocking talent at their heart. Examples of programmes which she has been instrumental in developing or delivering include: work with young people and disadvantaged groups to encourage them to consider a career in engineering; targeting women as potential apprentices; targeting diverse graduates; developing inclusive behaviours in leaders; a ‘working together’ programme with union representatives; a global graduate initiative and role model training for women leaders. Empowering individuals has been a recurring theme throughout Margaret’s career. She has played an active role in initiating schemes which ensure employees feel able to make a difference to organisational performance. For example, she helped to champion self directed teams at Rolls-Royce, which involved entire teams.
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