everywoman in Tech Forum Agenda
Early Careers Day
7 March: STEM students and final year students looking to learn from and connect with some of the most influential male and female tech leaders, as well as provide an opportunity to network with leading tech companies and mentors.
Main Tech Forum
9 March: Women in tech looking for inspiration, career advice, and advice on how to become the tech leader they aspire to become
Main Forum
Main Forum
Thursday 9 March 2023
09:00 GMT
Opening remarks, welcome and our 2023 networking challenge
09:10 GMT
Keynote – My climb to the C-suite: 3 things that brought me here
09:30 GMT
Keynote – Innovating differently: A career in computer networks
Dr Radia Perlman’s inventions have shaped the internet. She is most famous for inventing the spanning tree protocol (STP), which allowed the internet to scale from a local area network to the international web that we use today. She has been inducted into the Inventor Hall of Fame and The Internet Hall of Fame and holds lifetime achievement awards from Usenix and SIGCOMM. What is her approach to discovering and developing completely new concepts, algorithms and technologies? And how does she inspire her team to push the boundaries of the possible?
Speaker:
09:50 GMT
Panel – Sustainability challenge: turning consciousness into action
- How to start small, driving sustainability initiatives in the workplace
- Green inspiration: what projects have your peers in tech taken on?
- Setting your goal: identify a sustainability project that you take back to the workplace and work on tomorrow
Moderator:
Speakers:
11:00 GMT
Specialist tech pathways – Session 1
Panel – Post-pandemic careers: where are the future tech jobs?
Which areas are companies investing in now and why?
What are the emerging job roles you will see more of in the coming years?
Industries on the rise and the skills the big players are looking for
Panellists include:
Panel – Being an authentic female tech leader
- How did other women develop their leadership styles?
- Dealing with the tension between the leader you would like to be and the policy/cultural constraints of the organisation
- 360˚ feedback: distinguishing between useful feedback versus voices that are reinforcing old leadership norms
- Navigating cultural differences and communications styles across a multinational company
- What additional qualities have you brought into your organisation as a woman leader?
Moderator:
Panellists include:
11:30 GMT
Specialist tech pathways – Session 2
Interactive discussion:
Time to pivot? Putting your transferrable skills to work
Have you ever wondered how somebody made a giant career leap, say from structural engineering to data science? Or from project management to cyber security? Women in tech share their stories of recognising their own technical and non-technical transferrable skills to help transition into new fields and what else they needed to do to take bold new directions in their careers.
Panellists include:
- Michelle Ohren, Detective Inspector, Director and Head of Cyber and Innovation, West Midlands Police
Knowledge funnel:
Tech leadership in the new world of work
Tech leaders share their one best piece of advice on leading a team as we move into unchartered territory in the post-pandemic work environment.
- Approaches to balancing team cohesion with flexibility
- Managing friction between remote and office based employees
- Re-engaging tech teams: initiatives for reinspiring and supporting your people
- What makes a good leader in the age of agile, data centricity and digital?
Moderator:
Panellists include:
11:50 GMT
Specialist tech pathways – Session 3
Panel – So, you want to be a STEM ambassador?
- Which organisations could you work with? What are they focused on?
- What time commitment is involved?
- How much experience do you need before you can volunteer?
- What are people’s experiences of volunteering for these organisations?
Moderator:
Panellists:
Courageous conversations
How to be a better leader and ally to specific groups in the workplace. We look at how managers can have courageous conversations around:
- Menopause
- Ethnicity & Race
- LGBTQ
- Neurodiversity
12:10 GMT
Comfort break
12:10 GMT
Specialist Track: Aspiring Leaders
Fireside chat with Maja Pantic: Emotional Intelligence in AI and your career
12:20 GMT
Specialist tech pathways – Session 4
Power hour – How to be unafraid of failure
Fireside chat:
How to move up to the top job
IT leaders share their career journeys, what they prioritised and the traits they have developed in themselves to shore up their paths into leadership.
Speakers include:
12:50 GMT
Specialist Track: Tech Leadership
Panel – Burnout and wellbeing for tech leaders: the ultimate guide
The constant pressure to be keeping up with tech can weigh heavily on teams, especially when it compounds with another health or personal problem. How can tech managers help themselves as well as their teams? We will be looking at:
- Avoiding and managing burnout in your team and in yourself
- How do other tech leaders approach the work/life tussle?
- Managing and communicating your own mental wellbeing as a leader
- What can we expect from the talent pipeline as graduates come through who were students during the pandemic?
Panellists include:
13:20 GMT
Lunch break
14:20 GMT
Specialist Track: Software Development
Nailing your software development
- Which programming languages are:
- the most popular,
- attracting the highest pay and
- easiest to learn?
- To specialise or to generalise: which is the best strategy for your long-term career?
- What’s your experience of moving programming languages or tech stacks? What advice would you give to someone who is thinking of taking this step?
- What challenges have you faced in your software development career so far and how did you overcome them?
Moderator:
Panellists include:
14:20 GMT
Tech roundtables
How do other industries innovate? Our roundtables will give you the ultimate cross-fertilisation of ideas between different fields, industries and thinkers. Forge new peer relationships that challenge your approach so you can view progress through an entirely different lens.
- Cyber security
- Healthcare
- Financial Services
- Data Science
- Technology
- Tech Innovation
- Electric vehicles and battery tech
- Climate tech
- Sustainable energy
- AI
- VR/AR
- Gaming
- DeFi (crypto and NFTs)
Specialist Leadership roundtables
- How can we develop a more diverse talent pipeline in tech?
- Recruiting more diverse talent
- How to make it to the C-level in a tech career
- How to encourage and support male allyship in the workplace
Panel – Piloting your own career in cloud
Gartner expects global cloud spending to reach $600 billion in 2023*, so how can you ensure your career benefits from this exponential growth?
- Which certifications are worth investing in?
- Career paths of other cloud professionals: what progression can you expect?
- Avenues for networking and mentoring with other cloud specialists
- How can you ensure you don’t box yourself into a corner in your cloud career?
- How to move up in your career from entry and mid-levels
Panellists include:
Lightning talks: New frontiers in cloud computing
Top cloud engineering professionals share their tips and experiences of the latest developments in cloud, such as:
- IaaS, multicloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and serverless delivery models
- Enterprise-wide cloud migration
- Cyber security and data privacy for the cloud
Panellists include:
14:50 GMT
Specialist Track: Software Development
Lightning talks
Software development trends
A fast paced review of key innovations that have made their mark on software this year: what are developers’ experiences with them and will they be here to stay?
- DevSecOps: how is it being integrated into software development processes?
- Web 3.0: how will it impact different types of software development?
- Microservice deployment: to decentralise or not to decentralise?
- Cloud native application development
Moderator:
Panellists include:
15:00 GMT
Afternoon break and networking
15:40 GMT
Panel: How can we build equality into AI?
- What research is going on in this area to avoid AI discriminating against particular groups of people and reinforcing old stereotypes?
- Breaking down the black box: methods for identifying which data columns the algo is focusing on and how it is influencing results
- What non-technical factors are important for ensuring we don’t create less equitable algorithms?
- How do we move forward with AI without building a less equitable society?
- Whose job should it be to eliminate bias from AI?
Moderator:
Panellists include:
16:10 GMT
Keynote – How I launched my own Space career
Speaker:
16:25 GMT
Closing remarks
16:30 GMT
End of Forum
19:00 GMT
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