Insta star @Katie_Cranes celebrates #GLAD24
Social media influencer, Katie Kelleher, technical & development officer, CPA UK, otherwise known as @Katie_Cranes on Instagram is helping LEEA raise the profile of safe lifting as part of Global Lifting Awareness Day #GLAD24.
“I’ve been working in this industry for 10 years this year. Prior to that I studied English Literature at university and worked in sales for a very long time. I ended up in trades and labour recruitment and just thought ‘could I work in construction?’ and that's where it all started,” said Kelleher.
“I support GLAD because it's really important to strive for excellence in lifting, to strive for better training and better knowledge. Lifting is such a critical area of working in construction. Maybe not all lifts are high risk, but it's a high-risk activity. The moment you lift anything in the air it's a health and safety concern. You don't want to injure someone. You don't want to hurt someone, and you don't want to hurt your colleagues. So, it's important to have proper lifting equipment.
“It's important to have cranes that are regularly serviced and tested and looked at. All these things are really important to ensure that we don't have any incidents, accidents or problems on site. So drawing attention to this through GLAD highlights that we all need to take these things seriously.”
In support of the event, Kelleher will be sharing some lifting posts and videos on social media as well as looking to see what everyone else is posting using the hashtag #GLAD24.
“I became interested in social media after completing my apprenticeship and became a crane operator and started working on site. I thought there was a missing element in that when I was looking on Google and social media, there weren’t many women out there showing us what they did for a living, operating cranes, slinging, bricklaying, plastering. All these different things that we do in industry that are fantastic. So I thought, what if I put a few photos online of me working on site and it just took off from there.
“I'm regularly talking to school children, and they didn't know a lot about lifting and about working in cranes and being a crane operator. And I guess, we all have certain biases about which genders do which jobs. So I thought it was important to put things out there where young people could find striking images of working in construction,” she said.
“It’s the one area I feel most confident in. I love that I became a crane operator. It was the one thing in my life that I was really good at. I don't know if I've been as good at anything else since. But it was the one thing I was really proud of, to be able to go on site, operate these big bits of machinery and build these massive projects in London. Change the infrastructure, change the way people live and make things better for people. It was just always something I was really proud of.”
To watch the video with Katie and for more information visit https://globalliftingawarenessday.com
