Our key challenge is that we don’t have adequate female representation in IT. And while there are a number of women already working in technology with multiple STEM degrees and certifications, we found that many of these women are no longer in technical roles (due to life circumstances, lack of opportunities, lack of awareness of how to position oneself etc).
So we decided on a trial.
@poojagoel – DevSecOps manager intended to go for leave in Nov. With the specific aim in mind of increasing the number of women in technical roles, Pooja and her manager @carlos agreed to give two Rise and Shine women an opportunity to be coached (and coaxed) back into a technical role.
Over the last 4 months Pooja has been coaching two STEM qualified (nbn) women on DevSecOps.
While the initial aim was to get the women’s knowledge uplifted to (successfully interview) to do Pooja’s role, the results of the pilot turned out different.
Carlos and Pooja decided that specific experience and skills were needed for the replacement candidate for Pooja’s role.
Consequently, a secondment opportunity was offered instead to one of the women for a developer role in Pooja’s team.
Pooja’s stand-in is still in the interview phase – and the right candidate will be chosen. Here are the vital lessons from this exercise:
- Assess the women in your org who have STEM degrees and skills – but who are frequently overlooked. This is your talent pipeline.
- Make coaching a KPI for your people leaders. You have all this knowledge in-house. Use it.
- For highly technical roles, be mindful of the time it will take for the knowledge to be uplifted. Offer a secondment if you can so that the women are immersed in the role, fully.
- Choose the right candidate for the open role. No tokenism, please. This is essential to counter the argument that ‘women are getting preferential treatment’ or a woman got the role because of her gender.
- None of this would have been possible without advocate managers like Carlos – he is part of the environment needed for success.
I should also add that any secondment opportunities are also offered to our male colleagues. In this instance, I am talking about how to solve for a specific problem of increasing numbers of women in IT. Our data tells us that we are not optimised to reap the benefits that come from having diversity of thought, experience and backgrounds in our teams.
Thank you Pooja and Carlos for trialling this. Changing lives, you are.