Kalina Barboutov, Switzerland

I am proud to be a part of Power Grids because we give people a chance to make a difference. I am proud that at Hitachi ABB Power Grids, I am given the voice to speak for myself and feel heard.

At the beginning of my career, I was told that I didn’t present like a “regular engineer”. In the last 13 years, I have lived and worked in 12 countries, and I spent a decade in semi-professional sport. As a third-generation female engineer, I have been raised to speak up. In Power Grids I have a voice and can let my experience speak for me, as an equal.

I am grateful for the diversity within the organization. Diversity allows employees to see a problem from different angles, explore different solutions, and combine ideas that are together worth more than the sum of their individuals. Great ideas have no gender, age, ethnicity, or preference, and they may even move around on crutches or wheels.

Now, I am honored to lead an international team focused on wireless communications, which is at the heart of the digital transformation and carbon-neutral strategy of Power Grids. The work that we do can make such a big difference to the way our customers operate today and in the future.

More opportunities to make a difference will surely come our way in our future with Hitachi. It’s exciting that our small group will be instrumental in taking a mega enterprise like Hitachi into the era of 5G and state of the art industrial communications.