Jean de Castro - Raising Her Voice

Picking up the baton passed by her father, Jean de Castro is steering engineering firm ESCA through stormy waters in the Philippines

- Bill Bredesen

The arc of Jean de Castro’s career might look at first glance like a winding road, but actually, it is one that just went full circle. Now the chief executive officer of ESCA, a full-service engineering firm based in the Philippines, de Castro followed an unconventional path to the executive suite of a leading real estate company.

In her early professional life, de Castro was a successful litigation lawyer who was on partner track at a major Philippines law firm. Along the way, she landed a role as a business news anchor on Bloomberg TV. Then she decided around 10 years ago to return to her roots, in a sense, when she joined the company that her father, Ernesto de Castro, founded in 1982.

The younger de Castro had received an introduction to engineering and construction while working on an arbitration case for the law firm—a case that she says piqued her interest in real estate for the first time. When her father later asked her to join his company, saying he needed someone he could trust during a transition period, she felt it was an opportunity worth pivoting for.

“I had never considered this career path before that day, considering that I was not an engineer. But I also knew I could not turn down the chance to help out our family business,” de Castro says.

When she started working in the company’s HR and finance departments, it was “a strange shift from being a lawyer bringing in the revenue to taking on a more supporting role,” she says.