Lydia Zebian

Lydia. Photo credit: Texelis

Lydia is proof incarnate that being a mechanical engineer is not the boring job many might imagine. Today this elegant, ambitious young woman is the programme and development director of the defence business unit at Texelis, where she’s responsible for the Serval programme, the 4×4 multi-role armoured vehicle the company is building for the French Army with its partner Nexter.

Mechanical engineering has allowed her to live in different countries and to learn Japanese “enough to get by with,” she laughs. "I'd always wanted to be a mechanical engineer in the automotive sector," she says. But to confirm her choice she undertook an internship in the aerospace industry; her first impression was that “developing and testing were too slow for my taste. I then did an internship in the automotive sector and found it much more dynamic.”

““My meetings today aren’t about money, they’re about life and how to be first in the technological field”
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Brought up in Toulouse, she stayed to prepare for the stiff competitive entrance exams for engineering schools. She passed and chose the Institut supérieur de mécanique, more familiarly known as “SupMéca”, a mechanical engineering school in Paris and Toulon. She concedes that “it’s not amongst the leading engineering schools but I chose it because in the final year you spend six months working on a project – mine was to build a mobility platform using artificial intelligence – and then six months doing an internship.”

Lydia wanted both work experience and travel, so got an engineering job for six months in the United States after graduating. “But I came home to study at the Toulouse Business School because I wanted some credibility in business to enhance my career opportunities.”

Once that box was ticked, she thought the next best thing to finding employment abroad was to work for a foreign company. And she ticked that box too, getting a job with Nitto Denko, a Japanese company, which hired her in France for a year before offering her a position in Tokyo. She explains that most women working in the industrial sector in Japan, at least in the first decade of this 21st Century, held administrative jobs and went straight home after work, so as the only female engineer, and a foreigner to boot, her all-male Japanese colleagues were puzzled as to how to treat her. “Apparently they opted to consider me not as a woman but as a foreigner and as such invited me every evening to drink beer and sake with them after work. It was like being part of a ‘working’ family!” The days were often long. They started at 6 a.m, as she lived in the suburbs of Tokyo and needed an hour to get to work, and finished at midnight after the beer and sake. 

She and her husband spent a year in Tokyo before moving to Belgium where Nitto Denko had found her another position at their European headquarters.

Lydia says her takeaway from working for a Japanese company for seven years has been innovation methodology and a long-term outlook at strategy. “I use these every day,” she remarks, explaining that it “means taking small step by small step and never trying to introduce something that is totally new and untried. I've applied this in every job I've had and it's always been a success. It makes you credible because you don't start from zero.”

After spending five years in Belgium, Lydia and her family decided to return to France. “Travelling has made me like my country more. The base of France, such as the political system and the institutions are really quite good and I decided to come home because I wanted to be more connected to my country and its local industries.”

So in 2012, in the midst of the automotive crisis, and seven months pregnant with her second child, she applied for a job with a medium-sized company in the gorgeous Dordogne region in central France. The company, a tier one supplier of rubber parts for French car manufacturers “was small. Very few people spoke English and there wasn’t much of an international outlook when I joined. The company manager was also the town’s mayor so his principal concern was to maintain employment. My challenge was to maintain employment whilst modernising the way the company did business!” She started as a sales manager, a year later was sales & project group manager and then sales, R&D and project director. During her tenure the company grew through acquisitions in Europe and strategic partnerships in Asia. Lydia believes “this experience in different departments is a huge benefit to me today because it broadened my view.” 

Lydia on the Serval production line. Photo credit: Texelis

But four years ago, “I was looking for new challenges" and “a real opportunity” came up with Texelis in Limoges. But it was only after she started working there that she realised she’d made a good move. “I had no network in the defence sector at the time and quickly discovered my image of the military was all wrong. The main difference with civilians is that they're not engaged for business but for their country,” she remarks. “This is very different from the automotive industry. My meetings today aren’t about money, they're about life and how to be first in the technological field.”

Lydia explains that she’s hired more than 20 people for the Serval programme “and I'm very proud there is not much turnover in my team.”

She’s also very aware that she owes part of her successful career to her husband “who has followed me around and is very supportive. We have two kids who are 10 and 12 and we all have very busy agendas. My kids have always seen me travelling and working and being very busy but I always try and keep my weekends for them. I prefer having quality time with them rather than quantity time,” she adds.