Profile

Hi everybody! How are you all doing? Your hair looks fabulous today.

My name is Gina and I was raised in Hong Kong for 19 years. I moved to Wales for university 4 years ago and have since graduated with a Masters in Medical Engineering.

I currently live in Cardiff with my girlfriend who is studying Biomedical Science. We love travelling, singing Disney songs at the top of our lungs and brainstorming names for dogs that we will one day adopt.

I work at Sony UK Technology Centre as a Production Manager, where I lead a wonderfully skilled manufacturing team who build broadcast cameras. These are used to film movies and live sporting events (for example we are providing equipment for the UEFA champions league finals and for the 2018 FIFA world cup in Russia).

I also tutor mathematics and biology on the weekends – to those completing GCSE exams, I hope all goes well!

In my free time I pursue a variety of martial arts – I’ve practiced TaeKwon-Do for 14 years and Thai kickboxing for 4 years. I also enjoy rock climbing playing the drums.

At Sony UK TEC we manufacture market-leading video camcorders. They are used in movie making to TV dramas, live sport broadcast to news studios.

My area of responsibility is in camera assembly, testing and quality assurance. The camera comes to my team in pieces, it is then built into a fully functioning unit by a builder then put through a test process to see if it works perfectly. The quality assurance process is the last stage before it is packed and shipped to our customers.

As a production manager a big part of my role is to develop plans for use of materials, machines and people resources. I also work with my team to see what can be done better and faster. The most important responsibility that I have is acting as a motivator and leader for my operators.

First thing I do in the morning is call my team together for a huddle. I review how well we performed yesterday and show our targets for the day. This is also a chance for them to let me know if they have any problems so that I can solve them.

A ‘super-assembly’ cell used to build our cameras

I hold a daily meeting with other production managers to discuss our strategy for the week. I also hold a quality meeting where we discuss mistakes that have caused our cameras to fail and how we can stop it from happening again.

How I spend the rest of my day can vary greatly. I could be working on a quality improvement project, training operators, co-ordinating a new model introduction… I even do some building and testing myself!

Manufacturing is so multi-faceted and is forever moving forward – as a result my role is continuously changing and evolving, I often go to seminars and development courses to keep improving my abilities as a manager.

Ceremony for the completion of our first 4K camera, the first and only to be manufactured outside of Japan!

Part of our commitment to the local community is to inspire the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs and creative talent. At Sony UK TEC we host regular school visits and have opened our doors to over 3000 children. In addition we have regular visits from colleges and universities from across the UK and even welcomed some international students from France and Italy.

An example of one of the educational programmes we support is the Engineering Education Scheme Wales (EESW) – a non-profit, educational charity which aims to inspire and motivate young people to choose a career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).  We are pleased to be part of such a excellent programme, inspiring the next generation engineers, scientists and technologists. If I were to win the money, it would be given to a scheme like this to further enhance the learning opportunity we can provide.