International Women's Day 2025 - spotlight on Sophie Berlyn
To mark International Women's Day this year we sat down with Sophie Berlyn, Regional Director in Complex Engineering. With 10 years of experience, Sophie leads teams of both engineers and desk-based staff, role modelling exceptional service and delivery. Honoured as one of BT Group's Remarkable Women, Sophie loves the people she works with and is inspired by leaders like Allison Kirkby who emphasise staying true to oneself. She encourages ambitious women to consider a career at Openreach, where diverse experiences and opportunities await.
What’s your role at Openreach? Regional Director in Complex Engineering for the London & Southeast region. I lead a team of engineers and desk-based teams who build, provision and repair our FTTP & ethernet network & products.
How did you get the job? I am only in month three of my current role, having previously led the Fibre First programme team. I’ve been in Openreach 10 years with the first five years being in operational roles and the last five years being in programme delivery. The culmination of the last 10 years’ breadth of experience enabled me to be successful to step up into this role.
What’s the best part of your job? The people! I absolutely love spending time with people in the field and on the ground – the fantastic problem-solving attitudes and customer-centric focus of our engineers is amazing.
What’s the most challenging part of your job? My team covers a huge range of deliverables for our business and our customers, so juggling the multiple different priorities to ensure we deliver best in class service and delivery outcomes can be challenging. My job is to ensure we have the right people, whether that be our own direct labour or third-party partners, in the right places, with the right skills, to deliver everything we need to.
What’s a typical day for you? There really is no typical day! As I’m new into the team, I’m currently spending a lot of time out and about getting to know the team and my delivery partners and understanding what working in my region is really like. Today, I’m off to Cardiff to meet our desk allocation teams who are a very important extension to my team.
What does the ‘Remarkable Woman’ award mean to you? It’s such an honour to receive this and encouraged me to step back and reflect on my time in Openreach over the last 10 years. Openreach really has given me some amazing opportunities in my career and personal development journey, and it’s lovely to be recognised for my achievements during this time.
Who inspires you in your career and why? So many inspiring people! Most recently, it was great to hear a little more about Allison Kirkby’s career history and the challenges of rising through the ranks in a male dominated world at the GEN event. I particularly reflected on her view that women shouldn’t need to fit a mould to be successful at the highest level, and instead, being yourself, staying true to your values and forging your own way, is really key.
What did you want to be when you were a child? A popstar. I hadn’t yet realised the limitation in my inability to sing or dance!
What advice you’d give to women who are interested in working at Openreach? Openreach is a fantastic place to work, and I’d encourage ambitious women to absolutely consider a career here – don’t be put off if you’re not from an engineering background – I wasn’t, and you don’t need to be at all. Openreach is hugely people-centric and is a place where you can get a breadth of experience across operations, programme roles, strategy & transformation roles & many more!
