Miss René King is a Senior Engineer and Business Development Manager at Project Performance International (PPI). René has a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.
During her undergraduate career, René received the Dean’s award for notable performance in mechanics and mathematics. During her undergraduate degree, René spent her 3rd year and 4th year summer break completing vocational work at Steinmüller Bilfinger. At Steinmüller, she divided her time between in-office engineering activity and on-site manufacturing. During her office internship she worked on boiler design and developed software for the design of high pressure pipe flanges. During the manufacturing segment of her vocational work, she shadowed the plant manager in overseeing plant operations. Her given tasks included working closely with boiler makers in constructing high pressure pipes from design charts and learning about industrial machinery used in heat treating steel pipes.
René taught Mechatronics to postgraduate diploma students during 2017. Her work involved updating course material, lecturing and developing exam papers for part-time students. The role required in-depth knowledge of precision mechanical engineering, electronics and computer systems. Course content was centered on controller design with a smaller element of modeling and simulation in SimuLink.
René completed her Master of Science (MSc) in Systems Engineering in 2020. As part of her degree, she completed courses in Requirements Analysis, Systems Integration, Verification and Validation and Architectural Design. Her thesis topic encompassed evaluation of operational capacity for a freight railway network. This topic required a large amount of synthesis as this is a green-field area of research.
René joined PPI as a full-time employee in 2017. Since then she has worked alongside PPI Managing Director, Robert Halligan in developing course material and designing workshop systems for courses such as Project Risk and Opportunity Management 3-Day course (PROM3D) and Engineering Successful Infrastructure systems 5-Day course (ESIS5D). René has also been the PPI Project Lead for the joint INCOSE-PPI Systems Engineering Tools Database (SETDB) since 2018. As Project Lead, her work entails coordinating weekly meetings, managing requirements and modeling the system in Vitech’s CORE. In her role she conducts verification and validation of the website functionality using JIRA as an issue tracking tool. René is also the Managing Editor of the monthly PPI Systems Engineering Newsjournal (PPI SyEN).
In 2019, René became Managing Director of PPI’s daughter company, Certification Training International. In this role her activities include managing the quality of course content, ensuring continuous improvement of processes, writing up contracts for staff and driving the business forward to meet its objective of increasing the number of certified systems engineering professionals in the world.
Outside of her work and studies, René enjoys playing piano and guitar and is learning photography and video editing. René is passionate about self-development and leadership. Her ideal holiday would be reading a book out in the nature, and meeting new people at a music festival.
