Sarah Drljaca

Transcript

I like a lot about my job. It's a strategic role where I get to work both at a project level supporting the technical specialists in ensuring that their particular expert areas are influencing and being taken into consideration in projects - whether that be biodiversity, commercial fisheries, or strategic compensation. But I also get that opportunity to see the bigger picture - so not looking just at individual projects, but looking at a portfolio looking, at a region... how do we make all of these pieces of a puzzle fit together.

Another part of my role is working with those outside of Ørsted - to understand their concerns and overcome any challenges, but also to to look for opportunities for collaboration. That includes industry groups, regulatory bodies, statutory nature conservation bodies and many others - it's a joint effort.

We've had a lot of growth in the last 10 years, and I think what really excites me is the fact that I see the opportunities for the growth in the next 10 years. The scale of the projects from 10 years ago to now has dramatically changed, and they continue to grow.

I did a bachelor's degree in biological sciences, which was a really broad degree actually - it was all the way from being in the lab to being out on a boat looking at marine mammals... it was really varied and everything inbetween. As part of that, I did a year abroad, which was one opportunity that I took to perhaps specialize into marine science. Then I did a master's degree in international marine environmental consultancy - that was primarily to try and bridge a gap between the academic view of these activities into perhaps something that was more clearly applicable to a to a role, which is what that masters gave me.

I'm proud of a lot of things that I've done in my career, which is a really nice thing to be able to say. I think one of the things I'm most proud of is being part of the team within Ørsted that supported the market entries into Scotland and more recently into Ireland.

So one of the things that really drives me is the growth of the offshore wind sector. It's been fantastic that the UK and Ireland have been a leader in offshore wind, but there's so much potential still out there both in the UK and Ireland but also globally. I think that opportunity to be part of a team that drove expansion of an offshore wind developer into new markets was really exciting. Particularly in my current role there are my peers in other regions in other locations and what's really nice is there's so much opportunity to learn... each of us are working in different regulatory regimes, different with different legislation. We're working on different projects, different locations but there are some similarities and there are some differences. We can learn from each other on both of those.... Markets that are perhaps a bit more established can help share that knowledge across to newer ones. But also where there's other markets that are coming across new challenges, new barriers to growth, they can share that knowledge back with us and we can work together to find a solution that would enable the deployment globally.

I have a team of wonderful people who have their technical expertise, and I see my role is about helping to lead that team see what is important for the business, what's important for the industry - but also about what's important for them.... and ensuring that they are given opportunities to develop both personally and professionally, and also given the opportunity to input into projects and have their advice taken on board.

If I were to give some advice to someone starting out in their career, I think the first one would be about being open to opportunities. There's no one way to move into offshore wind - particularly in the consenting phase. I think it's about taking opportunities when they come and taking the opportunity to learn. The second piece of advice would be to not be scared to fail... every failure will lead to learnings, and there's a lot of ways to succeed but there's also a lot of ways to take any failures and turn them into development opportunities and it's about having that mindset of growth um and and really just enjoying the ride.