On 24 September, the European Centre for Women and Technology, the expert partner of the Women4IT project, organised in collaboration with Code Institute Ireland a successful webinar targeting the mentors of the national projects starting in September and beginning of October and running until June 2021.
In her introduction, Eva Fabry, Director of ECWT, stressed that when interviewing women who have a successful career in the IT and digital sector we always hear that “Everyone should have a mentor. You are never too powerful or successful to have one and they can benefit you at any age!”
During the webinar Maria McLoughlin, Community Engagement Manager and Juan Monetti, Senior Software developer and mentor at Code Institute shared their experiences and provided a lot of food for thought. Some of the takeaways from the session:
- Mentors have triple roles: (i) Consultants, (ii) Counselor: listening and motivating and (iii) Cheerleaders: providing support and enthusiasm.
- Build up a strong element of trust
- Present role models for the job profiles to give the women a clear vision
- Help the young women to open up, so that they ask or help instead of dropping out
- Crucial to commit for the training from day 1
- Important to set small achievable goals and scale engagements, so that mentees can experience success continuously
- Complement Peer-to-Peer learning with community building and interaction
An agreement was reached that partners will meet for an update halfway through the training course and for an evaluation after the end of the piloting.
During the course of the project, several webinars will also support dialogue between the key players of the ecosystem targeting: the piloting partners, businesses and employers, NGOs and other intermediaries and finally all partners interested in being involved in the exploitation of the project.
The Women4IT project financed by the EEA Grants and Norway Grants Youth Programme between September 2018 and August 2021 aims at training 1000 women in the age of 19 to 29 for the rapidly growing digital sector in close collaboration with the businesses and public employers in Greece, Ireland, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Spain.
Based on a thorough needs analysis of the businesses and the public sector 8 job profiles have been identified by the project consortium and most countries will run training of 4-6 profiles: Customer Service Support Representative, Data Analyst, Data Digital Media Specialist, Protection Specialist, Graphic Designer, Junior Web Designer, Project coordinator and Tester.
