Rover is betting on female talent through the RAI’s Women and Engineering project

Rover, for the second consecutive year, participates in the ‘Excellence Program for the development of female STEM talent’ of the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAI), where company professionals accompany, sharing their experiences and advice, young female engineers in the final stages of their university or postgraduate studies. It is about supporting them through mentoring in their transition to professional life.

Rover’s collaboration with the RAI is part of its agreement with ANCI, the National Association of Independent Builders, to join forces to address the existing gender gap in the construction sector and seek to increase presence, women’s interest and leadership in it, and also in STEM (Science, Technologies, Engineering and Mathematics) careers.

As Rafael Domingo, General Director of Construction at Rover and one of the company’s mentors in this edition of the excellence program points out, “for me it has been a very rewarding experience and a great surprise, because I had a great ignorance of what it meant to be a mentor. It is being a very profitable journey for both, providing the mentee with real knowledge of the labor market, as well as contact with different personalities within the sector.” Also, Domingo adds that “I have intended to cover different fields, so that the mentee can focus on her future with much clearer ideas and being clear that female talent knows no limits”.

For his part, José Luis Letón, Construction Director at Rover Rail and also a mentor of the excellence program, points out along the same lines as Domingo that “being able to participate in a process like this, contrary to what it may seem, is tremendously satisfying, both for the mentor and the mentee.” In this sense, Letón points out “that to her [mentee] allows her, on the one hand, to have the necessary tools to know herself better and, according to her desires and characteristics, to be able to choose where to direct her first professional steps.” And in his case, the mentor, “is a rewarding process in the sense that it requires you to document and think about certain topics and areas that are not of your daily competence, as well as meeting other mentors from different professional branches that enrich you.”