Engineering Spotlight – Courtney Kennedy’s Multi-Disciplinary Career Path

Premier Farnell employs a number of talented engineers across all our brands and services, each with their own unique skills, interests and backgrounds. These are the people who help keep our company at the forefront of engineering, innovation and technology. Over the coming months, we'll be celebrating them with this spotlight series...

Courtney Kennedy

Courtney Kennedy is a Technology Solutions Marketing Manager at Premier Farnell. She joined the company in 2017 and operates from our Leeds office in the United Kingdom.

A lifelong passion for engineering has fuelled Courtney Kennedy’s diverse career to date, taking her around the world and touching on a wide variety of disciplines, from hands-on product design and development to her current role as Premier Farnell’s Technology Solutions Marketing Manager.

“I’ve always been interested in how things work, and I enjoy making things and solving problems” she explains. “That’s basically what engineering is, so deciding to get into engineering wasn’t a difficult choice for me at all.”

With the support of her family, she pursued a degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada, specialising in integrated circuit design and control systems, with a focus on biomedical engineering.

Upon graduation, she remained in Canada for a time, working as an electrical engineer for civil engineering company Wasnae Mah Engineering, where she designed lighting, power, communication and life safety systems for buildings, becoming proficient in tools such as AutoCAD to create technical drawings in accordance with the Canadian Electrical Code.

In 2010 she took the leap across the Atlantic, relocating to the North UK where she spent several years developing prosthetic devices and other assistive medical technology as a design engineer for the Steeper Group. She quickly worked her way up to Head of Electronics Design, followed by a further promotion to Product Development Manager – heading a multi-disciplinary team of engineers to oversee the full product development lifecycle of innovative medical devices, from concept to development, prototyping, testing and production.

Having dedicated much of her career to the hands-on elements of product design and development, Courtney decided to make the leap into technical marketing in 2017 when she joined Premier Farnell. Her role as Technology Solutions Marketing Manager draws on all of her previous experiences, as she manages a variety of marketing programs for major product launches including development kits, single board computers and software, as well as implementing global automated email systems and carrying out company-wide technical training.

“Becoming an engineer, for me, never meant that I was going to be doing the same job day in and day out” she explains. “Being technically minded and having a background in electronics allows me to venture into a number of different fields and continually add to a skill set that is becoming increasingly well-rounded. My passion for engineering continues to open doors for me, and it’s a point of pride that I can look at my career as something that has constantly changing and evolved as I have and still am to this day.”

Do you have an inspiring story about how you became interested in engineering? Share it with us in the comments below, and keep an eye out for more from this spotlight series in the coming weeks...