This year, this young Saudi woman with little experience wrote a technical manual for the GE Power, an American energy technology company, owned by General Electric. Nour Al Rammah is a Riyadh-based citizen, born and raised in France before returning to the Kingdom at 17, who attended Al Yamamah University. With an academic background in business administration with marketing and finance, Al Rammah lacked the engineering degree she would have required to work for GE Power, but she didn’t let that stand in her way. Persevering and continually learning, Nour wrote a 400-page manual for those like herself who wanted to work for one of the world’s biggest companies but did not have the technical background.
Speaking to Arab News about where she thought she would be in terms of her career after university, she said, “When I studied marketing at university, I expected to land in a marketing company, doing some public relations, marketing and advertising.” So how has she ended up there? GE Power is a global company that has been ranked in the Fortune 500 Global list, and securing a position there is no easy feat. The Al Yamamah graduate had an aim to join GE Power’s leadership program, which is highly exclusive and only selects one candidate from Saudi Arabia per year. When she first applied for the position, she was rejected since her background did not match their engineering requisite. Prior to her application, Nour had been offered a sales and commercial internship with GE Power, without really knowing too much about what it entailed but she was determined to do her best, as she told the news site, “I could not reject such an offer. I wanted to explore the opportunity and I do not regret my decision.”
Desperately wanting to secure a position with GE Power after her internship, Nour Al Rammah wrote “Nour’s Book,” a manual for everything related to GE Power, and written in the simplest of terms for people like herself who have no experience with the engineering industry. “What inspired me to write Nour’s Book was to join the elite and most competitive commercial leader program, known as the CLP (Commercial Leadership Program) in GE. I felt so much empowerment to not let this (lack of engineering background) stop me, or be an impediment to me. Instead, I used this 400-page technical handbook to accelerate the technical learning curve, and I made it through the program thanks to the success of this book,” she said.
The book looks at GE Power’s portfolio, products, gas turbines, commercial terms and conditions, customer requests, and acronyms across four chapters, and is currently only available to the company’s employees and is offered to people joining GE Power. “I wanted to leave a legacy, a footprint. What did Nour leave behind her to help all these new employees join the power business without having an engineering degree? If I did it, then everybody can do it.”
“The first and most important key to success in the labormarket is to be unique”.
— جامعة اليمامة (@AlYamamah_Uni) October 9, 2020
- Nour Al Rammah, YU Alumna pic.twitter.com/rfiw9Bq2X2
“Nour’s Book” was also a way for Al Rammah to show GE Global how Saudi women could be a beneficial addition to the company’s workforce and showing the rest of the Kingdom that Saudi women do have opportunities within the energy sector. Congrats to Nour Al-Rammah who is now a commercial manager with GE Gas Power and feels empowered in her work environment. “Going to GE for me feels like going to my second home. Believe it or not, I spend more time at the office than I do with my family. We live in a country that gives golden opportunities to ambitious ladies,” she concluded to Arab News.
