Team Leader Consultant of the Year
Meet Jess Ridout. It’s fair to say that hers is not a typical consulting background.
For starters, she was a teenager with a penchant for troublemaking – so much so that, in the end, her dad refused to keep paying for her private education. After university, her first job was in banking. No client interaction but digging into data stores, not to mention time to indulge her passion for snowboarding. But not for Jess the ease of regular alpine jaunts and après ski – she went and qualified as a snowboard instructor.
Fast forward to today and Jess is leading a large team of consultants spearheading the delivery of Project Cerberus, an advanced Border Risking and Targeting Capability which brings together and analyses diverse data in real time to help quickly detect and combat fraud, crime and illegal migration at the border.
It’s a role which requires data expertise in abundance, check; empathy and responsiveness to an eclectic group’s needs, check; and a clear understanding of the myriad challenges of safeguarding nearly 8,000 miles of UK coastline, check.
Jess’s influence extends beyond her client responsibilities, however. As a high profile team leader, she goes out of her way to mentor large numbers of junior colleagues – something she has done in a variety of capacities since 2014.
Always looking for new ways to achieve impact; always looking for ways to turn objectives into reality; Jess describes herself as “a consultant to my fingertips”.
Clients and colleagues alike would surely agree.
View the BAE Systems profile in the MCA Members Directory.