Themes: Domain collaboration, Skills, Talent

The Defence industry faces a plethora of challenges, such as skills shortages, rapidly evolving technology and an uncertain global political landscape.  To enable coherent progress against these challenges, the Defence Suppliers Forum (DSF) provides the major conduit for strategic MOD-industry communications.  It enables strategic engagement between Government and the Defence Industry to facilitate the effective sharing of information, co-ordinating and aligning objectives and optimising the delivery of Defence capability from the Defence budget. Within the Main DSF construct the People and Skills Group brings a collective voice and the opportunity to engage on issues such as the educational skills demand signal and taxonomy, sustainability and ethics and promoting engineering as an exciting career for the future.

Anna Keeling joins us in her capacity as the joint Chair of the DSF People and Skills Group to discuss how the group is driving coherence across the Defence sector to collaboratively deliver on the Defence Industries most pressing issues.

Ms Anna Keeling serves as vice president and managing director of Boeing Defence UK (BDUK). She is responsible for the growth, alignment and business development of Boeing’s significant defence programmes in the United Kingdom. Boeing, across all businesses, operates in the UK at more than 30 key sites and employs 2,600 people directly and many more through a significant domestic supply chain.

Anna has two decades of global leadership experience in the aerospace and automotive sectors. Before joining Boeing in 2019, she was senior vice president for business transformation at GKN Aerospace, leading its business improvement plan to drive profit, margin and cash, and senior vice president for commercial, where she assumed responsibility for the company’s global commercial governance and ensured an aligned customer strategy across the business.

Anna is passionate about helping others develop and appears regularly as a keynote speaker at forums aimed at promoting female talent development within the global corporate environment. Anna was one of 2017’s 100 Women to Watch in The Female FTSE Board Report.