Tue, 08 July, 2025
We are pleased to announce that our new CEO, Caroline Gumble, has now started in the role, as well as the appointment of Claire Kimpton as our new Chair of Council. This marks a new era, creating an exciting opportunity to build upon our foundations, experience, and technical excellence.
While we remain proud of our heritage and decades of support, we also recognise that these are uncertain economic times for many industries and professionals. We are in a unique position to help stimulate the UK economy through research and development, supporting our Industrial Members, accelerating innovation and enabling them to become more competitive in local and global markets. This aligns directly to the UK Government’s ‘Invest 2035’ Industrial Strategy, which focuses on tackling barriers to growth in eight high potential growth-driving sectors, creating the right conditions for increased investment, high-quality jobs, and ensuring tangible impact in communities across the UK. Of the eight sectors highlighted by Invest 2035, TWI operates and has strong connections in four, making us ideally placed to help the UK progress towards targets for sustainable and resilient growth.
Meeting these targets for the UK also means addressing challenges around the global skills shortage across engineering. The expertise and support of The Welding Institute and our Professional Members, complementing TWI Training and TWI Certification, will facilitate the next generation of experts.
Creating pathways means reaching under-represented groups to increase diversity across engineering. This includes prospective engineers and technologists from ethnic minority backgrounds, and those who come from socio economic groups, areas that have had more difficulty in accessing routes into industry. Not only does this fill the skills gap, but it also introduces new voices and opinions into industry, something that has been the backbone of research and innovation since our inception.
Both Caroline and Claire bring a great deal of experience to their roles. Caroline was most-recently the CEO of the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), where she oversaw a successful business transformation. Before this, she worked extensively in engineering, including a tenure at Make UK (formerly known as EEF). Caroline’s knowledge of membership-based organisations has also been developed through her own membership of the professional bodies CIPD and MIEx and her position as a non-executive director of the Board of Trustees for the Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade. Having studied with The Open University to gain a BSc in social sciences as she grew her career in industry, Caroline was later awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from The University of Wolverhampton and is a visiting professor with Loughborough University.
Speaking on her role as CEO, Caroline said, “It is a great privilege to be appointed CEO of The Welding Institute Group at this critical moment in our history. I am looking forward to working with Claire and our committed Council Members. In my first months I will be engaging and listening carefully to our Professional and Industrial Members, my colleagues, and other key stakeholders from industry. I thank everyone for the warm welcome I have received since my appointment was made public, and look forward to the successes and challenges ahead with a positive focus and energy.”
Claire will already be known to many through her existing connections to The Welding Institute and TWI as Chair of the Professional Board and Vice Chair of Council. Passionate about promoting STEM for young people and developing careers in engineering, Claire began her career as part of the Doosan Babcock Welding Engineering team, where she went on to manage and control a range of welding activities across operational sites around the world, as well as running research/development projects to provide novel, bespoke solutions for clients’ welding problems. She now works at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), where she is a leading technical authority on welding who works on developing welding solutions for experimental and prototype fusion reactors. With an undergraduate degree in metallurgy and a PhD in materials science from the University of Birmingham, Claire has also been professional member of The Welding Institute since 2013 with chartered status through registration with the Engineering Council. While she will now step down from her position as Chair of the Professional Board, we are delighted that she has taken up the role of Chair of Council.
Commenting on her new role as Chair of Council, Claire said, “I feel honoured to have been appointed as Chair of Council and look forward to building on my time as Vice-Chair. Although this means I am now to step down as Chair of the Professional Board, it was a privilege to hold this position and I look forward to helping Caroline deliver a new era for The Welding Institute Group.”
We would also like to thank David Wrathmall for his diligent work as interim CEO since April, 2024, and former Chair of Council, Humbert Mozzi for his years of service.