FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS

摘要

She's effortlessly glamorous with an air that suggests that nothing would faze her. Paula Bell is about as far removed from the stereotypical engineering finance director as you could get. For the past three years, this charismatic 41 -year-old blonde has held the top finance job at Ricardo plc, a market-leading engineering and automotive consultancy at the cutting edge of the industry.rnEngineering is in Bell's DNA - her father worked for Rolls-Royce for 40 years and her brother is a structural engineer - and she could see no reason why being a woman should stand in the way of carrying on the family tradition.rnBorn in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, Bell was educated at her local comprehensive. After her A-levels, she was on track to take up a place at Brunei University to study IT but had a last minute change of heart when offered a job as a trainee systems accountant with the Port of Blyth. In the first step of her extraordinary fast-track career, she qualified as a chartered management accountant in two years instead of the usual four - at the same time writing the software that ran the port.