You could say Lorika Chery’s career is founded on a central fascination: What happens when science meets the real world?
In high school, Chery was fascinated by nuclear energy and imagined becoming a nuclear engineer. But when she arrived at Georgia Tech, she chose to study industrial engineering and eventually completed a Sustainable Business Certificate, which allowed her to explore how a sustainability lens could be applied to different problems.
Now, as a participant in Hitachi Energy’s Power+ Graduate Program, she’s getting to put that education and curiosity into practice. The 18-month program gives recent graduates the opportunity to explore different roles and business areas through three rotations, with the potential to complete an international assignment along the way.
“We have the opportunity to complete an international rotation and learn more about how Hitachi fits into the global energy framework, and experience living and working in a different cultural environment,” Chery says.
Chery recently moved from the U.S. to the United Kingdom to complete her second six-month rotation. The experience is giving her a chance to see how Hitachi Energy operates across cultures and markets—and more room to shape what she wants her own career in energy to look like.
Following a curiosity about energy
Chery’s interest in the energy sector solidified during her freshman year of college. But before joining Hitachi Energy, she spent a summer interning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where she worked as a Critical Infrastructure Analyst. The experience gave her a closer look at the power grid and the many factors involved in keeping it resilient.
“I learned so much about the power grid and how everything is so complex yet interconnected at the same time,” she says.
Chery also had ownership over a project during her internship, learning on the fly about different algorithmic methods and computer programming techniques to support grid resilience. The experience gave her an early opportunity to work through the kinds of interconnected problems that define the energy industry.
A career path she can help shape
The Power+ Graduate Program offers three six-month rotations, but Chery says one of its most valuable features is the agency participants have in shaping those experiences.
“One of the great things about the program is how much agency you are given in choosing and shaping your rotations,” she says. “You have to take the time to reach out to managers interested in working with a Power+ program member and see how you can develop something during your six months together; instead of it being chosen for you.”
That flexibility has allowed Chery to explore different parts of Hitachi Energy while gaining a better understanding of what she wants from her career after the program.
“The opportunity to move around different business units and roles has really helped in solidifying what I want to do when I begin a full-time position next year,” she says.
Her first rotation was within Global Business Corporate Functions, which work across Hitachi Energy’s five other business units: Grid Automation, Grid Integration, High Voltage Products, Service, and Transformers. The experience gave Chery a chance to see how different parts of the company operate and support one another.
“Corporate Functions sit horizontally across these business units, so it was fascinating to see how they each operated from an external point of view,” she says. “On the global level as well, each team has their own culture, so starting off in corporate functions gave me good insight into how each support Hitachi Energy.”
Seeing the bigger picture
Moving between teams has also changed the way Chery thinks about the energy industry itself.
Her experience at Lawrence Livermore gave her an early look at the power grid. At Hitachi Energy, working with different business units has shown her just how many people and processes contribute to keeping it stable and secure.
“It has really heightened that notion of complexity, which I mentioned earlier,” she says. “So many people and processes come together to ensure that our grid is stable and secure.”
And that’s part of what makes this an especially interesting time to start a career in energy. Technology is continually changing, and Chery is excited to see where those changes lead.
“There are technologies that are being developed and expanded upon continually and looking back, say 30 years ago, many of today’s technologies were in their infancy,” she says. “It will be interesting to see how digitalization changes how the energy sector will look like in the next 30 years.”
Growing with a community behind her
Chery’s experience in the Power+ program has also been shaped by the people around her. Her managers have encouraged her professional development, including supporting her participation in a professional conference during her first rotation.
The conference gave Chery the chance to learn from industry experts, gain new perspectives, and expand her professional network—an opportunity she says reinforced that her development is valued at Hitachi Energy.
“Their support made me feel invested in and reinforced that my growth and long-term career goals are valued by Hitachi,” she says.
She tries to pay it forward through her own participation in the Power+ community. By joining coffee chats and panel discussions, she can offer others the same kind of guidance and encouragement that has helped her along the way.
“Giving back to the community through activities like coffee chats and panel discussions is especially meaningful for me because I have benefited greatly from guidance and advice from others, especially when I didn’t know much about what I wanted to do at that stage; it’s super rewarding,” she says.
Her advice to new college students? You don’t have to have it all figured out
If Chery could give her college self one piece of advice, it would be to resist the pressure to have her career mapped out from the start.
“If I had to give advice to myself as a college student, it would be to stay open to any opportunity and not be too concerned about having a perfectly defined career path,” Chery says. “Some of my most rewarding opportunities have come from saying yes to challenges outside of my comfort zone. I would also encourage myself to simply chat and connect with more people since those conversations can lead to something great.”
It’s advice Chery is continuing to put into practice. From exploring different areas of Hitachi Energy to moving to the United Kingdom for her second rotation, she’s saying yes to opportunities that are helping her figure out where she wants to go next.
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