Growing up in Lincolnshire in Britain, Sarah Earey was 16 when her parents separated. She decided to leave school – missing out on the last two years – and look for a job to help support her mother financially., a global aerospace and defence technology company.
The teenager may not have been academic, but she was practical and had completed a typing course at night school, which helped her find a position as a secretary at a real estate agency in a nearby village. After two years she landed a similar job at a small defence company closer to home. It meant she could save on bus fares and give her mother more money.
But she loved her role as global sales manager for explosive ordnance disposal robots – and the US parent company never axed Earey or her role. Earey concluded that if she were to go back and study it would be psychology-related, given her interest in people and how organisations work.“I love to know that there are smarter people than me sat in the room because building the organisation for me is all about that,” Earey says. “If I could do everything, then I would be a super busy person with my fingers in every pie. But if I’ve got smart people who do it and do it amazingly well, that’s absolutely the dream.