Hilary Smyth-Allen - Looking back on 25 years of BYPY

Photo credit: Birmingham Post

This year, we are celebrating 25 years of the iconic BYPY Awards. The awards highlight the exceptional talent and skills of young professionals across Greater Birmingham, while also giving the overall winners the chance to open doors in their careers that they might not otherwise have been able to open.

As part of these celebrations, we spoke to the overall winners of the awards, dating right back to the very first winner in 2001 to last year's winner.

Meet Hilary Smyth-Allen, our BYPY 2011 winner.

After a number of happy years at AECOM (formerly Davis Langdon), Hilary turned her personal interests into her day job as a champion for Birmingham & the West Midlands, professional services sector, particularly around skills, diversity & inclusion and innovation.

Now a portfolio career person, Hilary's work covers all aspects of strategic stakeholder engagement across private, third and public sectors, working with business, HE and not-for profits with an overall mission to create lasting impact on our city region.

Read all about how winning BYPY felt for Hilary below..

What category did you win?

I won the Property and construction category and overall BYPY in 2011.

Tell us a bit about yourself…

I run Supertech WM, a cluster organisation which sits in the middle between industries, such as business professional, financial services and technology sectors. Within that, we cover fintech, legal tech, property tech and academia and public sector.

We particularly do two things- one, we are a safe space for innovation. We create, we help businesses to actually innovate and connect them to the innovation ecosystem and run programmes for them. And by doing that, we are the community for
next generation services.

For any new entrants, fintechs, legal techs and that community that actually are trying to change the way that business professional financial services is delivered, we are that community, and that helps place West Midlands on the map a little bit more.

Where were you working at the time of winning your award?

When I won, I worked for Davis Langdon which was a global leading built environment consultancy, in quantity surveying and project management. I worked in tax advice within the Built Environment in the Birmingham Office and that was all very lovely. I had a great team and a great boss who helped nominate me.

I won the Common Purpose course and that was such good timing for me in terms of exposing me to cross sector industries, and really understanding what transferable skills meant.

I got to meet different businesses through their leadership programme, such as small charities who were very purpose driven and the head of police. In doing this, I realised that I maybe I wasn't really loving selling tax, and it showed me that maybe I could do something else.

I found myself as a member of Birmingham Future, and I was constantly defaulting to all my volunteering work with Birmingham Future and the committee stuff that I was involved with, over my job. So, I said to myself, how do I pivot here?

I then got pregnant and thought that was the end, I wasn't very good at being on maternity leave, so I used it to start my portfolio career and in my first maternity I had become non-exec of the Birmingham Leadership Foundation, where the chair was another BYPY winner, Anthony McCourt.

I then became executive director of BPS Birmingham on my second maternity leave.

Why should people apply for GBYPY?

No one goes into something like this expecting to win, but it’s like a career lottery ticket- you just might win.

How did winning BYPY feel for you?

It's a big thing at the time, but it isn't a complete switch. However retrospectively, all my last decade of my career stems from that night of winning.