Reflecting on staff experiences: Celebrating Rachel Waugh's ten year milestone with Oakdene Hollins

We are excited to share that Principal Consultant Rachel Waugh, has been a valuable member of the Oakdene Hollins team for over a decade! In honour of this significant milestone, we sat down with Rachel to discuss her journey at Oakdene Hollins thus far.  

Pictured: The Oakdene Hollins team

Pictured: Principal Consultant Rachel Waugh

Rachel first encountered Oakdene Hollins while pursuing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Oakdene Hollins was a member of the industrial consortium for the WellMet2050 project, which Rachel was a part of during her PhD. Through this experience, Rachel learned about Oakdene Hollins' reputation for conducting thorough technical research, being trustworthy, and engaging in cutting-edge projects, which attracted her to the company.  

Over the course of ten years, Rachel has developed close relationships with the Oakdene Hollins team; learning from, working with, and teaching other consultants.   

Pictured: Rachel talking to Walter Stahel at the Resource conference in 2014 

Rachel has gained extensive expertise by working alongside experienced colleagues, engaging with stakeholders across various industries, the public sector and academia to enhance her knowledge. She has worked on projects that require detailed technical analysis and modelling. 

Rachel's research background is in the steel and aluminium industries, and her PhD explored material efficiency – providing the same services using less material – which includes activities such as remanufacturing. Since joining Oakdene Hollins, Rachel notes how awareness of remanufacturing has become more prevalent, as has the increasing recognition of frameworks around Circular Economy (CE), which aim to retain the value of products for longer. These frameworks demonstrate how we can use less material and extend the life of products, marking an important change for industry.  

As a part of a small organisation, the Oakdene Hollins team enjoy doing things together inside and outside of the office to show off our skills. Rachel showcased her baking skills when she won the office bake-off, with her plaited chocolate loaf!  

A notable highlight in her time with Oakdene Hollins was in 2018, when Rachel helped coordinate the first annual meeting of the European Remanufacturing Council (CER) in Berlin, which was an initiative that resulted from the European Remanufacturing Network Horizon 2020 project that she helped develop and run. One of the main goals of the project was to establish a legacy organisation to represent the interests of European remanufacturers across all product sectors, and the meeting was a great success. There were many excellent participants, who engaged in productive discussions, and gave positive feedback about the event. From these early days, the CER continues to grow and advocate for remanufacturers across Europe. 

Finally, we asked Rachel what advice she would give to junior staff, she said:  

“One of the nice things about the work we do is the ability to bring people together across our own networks to share knowledge and make connections: someone might have an idea or initiative in one area that can be transferred and developed to help address a problem somewhere else.  Another great thing about working here is the knowledge and experience of the people we engage with, and the chance to learn from people who are experts in their own fields. So don’t be afraid to ask questions, be curious! It's okay to be a listener - we can all learn from each other. “  

We thank Rachel for being fundamental part of the Oakdene Hollins team for ten years and cannot wait to see what she does next!