MotherBoard Event Roundup: Mentorship – Supporting Women in Tech

On Friday, October 15th MotherBoard hosted a panel talk and Q&A with industry experts covering the importance of coding boot camps and mentorship programs for women in Tech.

The panel discussed the best advice for women looking to get into software development and also how to support those who are looking to progress into leadership positions through vital support and guidance.

We’ve collated some of the notable and hopefully useful highlights from the event below.

You can watch the full broadcast via this link.

Make sure not to miss the next MotherBoard panel by checking out the upcoming events.

Nicola Martin,
Head of Quality
Adarga

What are the benefits of having a mentor?

“The benefits are clear, if you’re looking to move from a very junior role and your aim is to end up at C-suite level then having a mentor is an invaluable thing for you.

Or depending on where you are in your career, you might just be completely lost and not know what to do next. So there are absolutely benefits to having a mentor throughout your career and I think it’s something that people will now start to do.

It could be that you’ve just started with a company and you want a buddy, so somebody who’s at the same level as you to show you the ropes and just to go through some of the pitfalls. They might have experience, or it might be somebody who is right up there, gone really through their career and it’s just wanting to give back. So you reach out to them because they’ve got all of that good career experience that they can share with you. There are benefits, absolutely, to having a mentor.

Jon Linklater-Johnson,
Head of Engineering
LabGenius

Importance of returning mothers

If you’ve got a good mentorship relationship, your mentors should treat that as like a confidential relationship. So for mothers, especially, it can be great just to have that person you can go for a coffee with and complain to and say, actually I’m finding it really hard today, it’s really tough and I’m tired.

Your mentor can listen to you and support you and not have to worry about managing performance, managing expectations to be an open, honest conversation.

If the person wants it, the mentor can offer tips on how to navigate prioritize workloads, can always help take things off their plate without having to be a bit more formal by going to your manager or that kind of thing.”

Nicola Martin,
Head of Quality
Adarga

Finding a mentor

“It could be that you can utilize social media. There are probably people talking about mentorship on Twitter and there’s definitely conversations around mentorship on LinkedIn. There are tons of events happening and you can reach out to speakers from events, for example.

If they don’t know somebody, they’re likely to put you in touch with someone else who might be able to help you. And it’s really as we were talking about earlier, just reach out to people and see whether or not informally they would like to help you.”

When is the next live MotherBoard event? View the event schedule.

MotherBoard is a community that has been created to drive positive change throughout the UK Technology and Data sectors. Creating environments that support the inclusion of working mothers offers a significant solution to the shortage of talent across the Technology and Data sectors. We’re here to educate, challenge, and create that shift. We’re not here to berate, we’re here to connect, embrace and champion positive change-makers.

Our community is open to all. Mothers working in tech, organisations who are up-skilling returners back into work as well as employers that are consciously looking to create inclusive programmes to attract mothers into their Technology and Data teams. We actively encourage females, males, and non-binary folk to join us and to get involved. >

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Amber from ADLIB – https://www.adlib-recruitment.co.uk

If you would like to get involved in building and running our community please get in touch at amber@adlib-recruitment.co.uk

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Written by

Senior Recruiter

Developers & Technology

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Amber Rowbottom