Looking at Dr Yasmin Garcia-Sterling’s career on paper, it would be easy to assume she changed direction several times.
She started as a beauty therapist, worked in a children’s hospice supporting some of the most vulnerable families in the country, studied business at Brunel, then took a master’s and a PhD at UCL, researching how people navigate complex buildings.
She has since worked with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, and public universities, and is now a lecturer and deputy programme lead at UCL, alongside founding two of her own communities.
Every switch looks unrelated, but listening to her talk through them, a single thread runs underneath all of it: people thrive when they feel they belong, and too many of the spaces we build still aren’t designed with that in mind.
A Career That Was Always About People
Yasmin didn’t set out with facility management, or even higher education, in mind. Growing up, University wasn’t something she had any particular aspiration towards. She went into beauty therapy instead, eventually working in Harley Street and training through her NVQs.
It was there, learning the anatomy and physiology behind the work, that something in her thinking shifted.
“I realised that beauty wasn’t just external, it was internal as well.” — Dr Yasmin Garcia-Sterling
Around the same time, she started noticing something else, on the London Underground of all places: people struggling to navigate stations that clearly weren’t built with them in mind, a wheelchair user unable to get off a train easily, commuters visibly disoriented on an ordinary day. She has described asking herself, in that moment, what was contributing to it, and how she could make someone’s life even a little easier.
That question is what pulled her toward a built environment course at UCL. By her own account, she chose it because it was sold to her around the idea that people sit at the centre of the profession. Years later, she’s the deputy programme lead of that same course, teaching students the same way she once wished someone had taught her: without asking them to conform to one mould.
When You Start Seeing the Things Everyone Else Misses
Yasmin’s PhD looked at how people navigate buildings that weren’t designed with them in mind, work that took her into hospitals, secure Ministry of Defence buildings, and university campuses.
In hospitals, she describes what it’s like for a cancer patient arriving for treatment, already exhausted, already carrying the weight of everyone who’s had to rearrange their day to be there too, walking down a corridor that feels like it never ends. Something as small as a bench changes that experience entirely.
“Something simple like a bench in a corridor helps so much, doesn’t it?” — Dr Yasmin Garcia-Sterling
In secure MOD buildings, she found a different kind of disorientation. Visitors are given clearance to move through certain areas unescorted, but there’s an invisible boundary around the rooms and floors they’re not meant to enter, one nobody explains outright. Ask the wrong question in the wrong place, and it carries weight. Take a wrong turn looking for something as ordinary as a toilet, and there’s nobody to ask.
At universities, the same problem shows up more quietly still: an international student, away from home for the first time, trying to work out where they belong in a building that was never built with their unfamiliarity in mind.
Most people walk through a building and see architecture. Yasmin sees the experience of the person trying to get through it, and that distinction is where her whole approach to facility management begins.
Building More Than Better Spaces
Facility management, Yasmin argues, is too often brought into a project after the design is finished, and handed the keys once every major decision has already been made without it.
“We need to start having these hard conversations that facility management needs a seat at the table.” — Dr Yasmin Garcia-Sterling
That belief is what sits behind the two communities she’s founded. PhDConnect grew out of how isolating doctoral research can be, while Pathways Connected takes it further by working internationally to link students directly into industry rather than watching graduates drift into roles that have little to do with the built environment at all.
As an owner of an FM business himself, Brij Thankey doesn’t let himself off the hook in the conversation either. He admits that hearing Yasmin talk through the gap between what universities are teaching and what the industry is actually ready to use left him thinking about his own hiring.
“I think, as somebody from the industry, I need to do more.” — Brij Thankey
The Full Circle
From the outside, Dr Yasmin Garcia-Sterling’s career looks like a series of unrelated turns: beauty therapy, hospice work, a PhD studying hospital corridors, and two communities built from scratch, but when you listen to how she describes each one, it stops looking like a series of turns at all, because each chapter has been driven by the same conviction: that people deserve spaces where they can belong, and opportunities where they can contribute.
“It’s given me a platform to be able to have conversations like this.” — Dr Yasmin Garcia-Sterling
The buildings matter. The research matters. The education matters. But only because the people standing inside them do.
Watch or Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece only captures part of what Yasmin and Brij explore together, from wayfinding and inclusion to the gap between what universities teach and what industry is actually ready for, and what it will take to close it.
The full episode is worth your while, especially if you’re a leader, student, someone working in the built environment, or simply curious about how places influence our everyday lives.
Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Amazon Music.
More conversations like this are available at brijthankey.com.
