Celebrating International Women in Engineering Day: Steph Hayes

Water Asset Team Lead Steph Hayes manages water assets through their full life cycle, from maintenance, renewal and replacement 

Eleven years into her career at Hunter Water, Water Asset Team Lead Steph Hayes believes the best engineering insights come from getting your hands dirty - talking to operators, maintenance crews and the people who use the infrastructure every day. It's an approach that has shaped both her leadership style and her advice to the next generation of engineers. 

Growing up in a family of builders gave her a natural pull toward the built environment, and a love of maths and science made civil engineering an obvious choice. Over more than a decade with Hunter Water, she's worked across civil engineering, operations and planning, with a stint in the field team along the way. 

Now leading the Water Asset Team, she manages water assets through their full life cycle, from maintenance, renewal and replacement. A typical week might see her advising on a new reservoir, supporting a complex pipe repair, or weighing up the best way to renew an ageing asset. 

Among the projects she's most proud of is her work in incident management, helping coordinate fast responses when severe weather disrupts services. She's also been involved with innovative and complex repairs, such as installing flexible liners in a large diameter pipe, and may by project managers when challenges call for different solutions. 

“Engineering is such a broad subject. You’ll work with many different engineers and there will always be someone that can offer a different perspective. My advice would be to have a learning attitude - in engineering, the learning never stops.”  

Her message to young women considering engineering is practical: don't shy away from hands-on learning, and don't underestimate what you'll gain from listening to the people with lived experience of the end assets.