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Jennifer Noell makes a name for herself in a male-dominated industry while carrying on work done by her very own grandfather.
Take a quick glance at Jennifer Noell and you probably wouldn’t guess that she spends her workdays climbing on top of elevator cabs, or loading them with thousands of pounds of test weights.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked onto a jobsite and people have looked at me and said, ‘You’re the elevator inspector?’” laughs Noell, owner of Roanoke Valley Elevator Inspection, LLC.
But if her success in a male-dominated industry tends to take folks by surprise, there’s no one more surprised than Noell herself. She’d been working as a bartender for 10 years when her father – who’d spent his life in elevator maintenance – approached her with an idea: why not launch an elevator-inspection business together?
“He was supposed to do the inspections. I was supposed to do the paperwork,” Noell remembers. “That’s not the way it worked.”
Shortly after they founded their business in 2012, Noell’s father suffered a severe stroke, which left him unable to work for the foreseeable future. Suddenly, Noell found herself facing a difficult choice.
“It was kind of either, we’re going to do this and go all in, or we need to get out now,” she recalls. “And we just decided to go all in.”
That meant hiring an inspector who could do the on-the-ground work while her father began his recovery. Meanwhile, Noell undertook a two-year apprenticeship, learning the ins and outs of elevator shafts herself.
“I didn’t know anything about elevators. I knew how to fill the reports out,” she admits. “So I needed to do it.”
The unexpected shift made her the third generation in her family to make a living in and around elevators, and Noell is still delighted to find herself inspecting gears and cables that her grandfather repaired decades ago.
But advocating for elevator safety has sometimes meant persisting in male-centered environments, often with what Noell calls “a lot of stubbornness on my part.”
“It does get interesting when you walk in and there’s some very important men staring at you,” she says. “Their entire grand opening depends on whether you pass that elevator or not. It’s a lot of pressure.”
The pressure is worth it, she says, and she hopes other women and young people consider a career in the field.
“It’s very challenging, and it’s very rewarding. … The job security is unbelievable,” she says. “I wake up every day and think, ‘How did this happen?’ … It was a blessing that was in disguise, for sure.”
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