The ”Empowering…” Initiative, a cross-sector programme designed to improve levels of gender diversity in tech leadership across Scotland, will be marking its first year of existence with a national graduation event on the 2nd of December at our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh.
The collaboration between leadership coaching consultants Empowering-You and communications consultancy I to I Communications, has been supported since its inception by industry body ScotlandIS, The Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate and the Scottish Digital Academy, along with financial backing from some of the Scottish tech community’s leading companies.
The initiative has launched two programmes in its first year, “Empowering Women to Lead Digital Transformation” and “Empowering Women to Lead Cyber Security” with both sharing the long term aim of building a community of empowered and empowering female leaders in digital and cyber security roles across all industry sectors, in a bid to tackle the historic shortage of women in senior tech leadership roles. Both 3-month programmes are free of charge to participants, with funding provided from industry partners ranging from The Data Lab, Head Resourcing, Sopra Steria and Scott Logic through to Adarma, Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley and NCC Group.
The December event will bring together all 48 participants from both programmes, along with alumni from earlier cohorts and a broader audience of senior representatives from across the tech community in both government and the private sector.
In addition to the graduation, the event will serve as a forum for the participants to present the outputs from the “Challenge” projects they have undertaken throughout the programme, which include a range of societal challenges which technology can help to address. The showpiece event is sponsored by cloud computing and managed IT service leaders, Iomart along with the software engineering and digital transformation specialists, PDMS.
The graduation event is invitation-only but further details can be found at https://empoweringinitiative.eventbrite.co.uk and details of planned future cohorts for 2022 will be announced in the coming weeks.