The birth of a network

Background

We started to throw around ideas on how we might solve this candidate shortage. We started to discuss how women are underrepresented in the IT industry in Ireland. However, we didn’t know how underrepresented, so we took a look at our database broken down by gender and it gave us some interesting insights.

The first, that only about 25% of the technical IT community is female. The second, that the more technical the job, the lower the female participation %.

We agreed that we needed to find out more, and then we won a big managed service contract and parked this for a further nine months!

The report

By the time we looked at this again in Q4 of 2013, the need to address the skills shortage had become even more pressing as the wider Irish economy continued to recover. So we sat down and surveyed our female candidates and clients about their experiences in IT jobs. Over 150 responded to the survey and we conducted further qualitative research by interviewing some prominent IT professionals from AIB, IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, ESB, Accenture and Coderdojo for girls.

The launch

By May 2014 the “Women in IT – Untapped answer to the skills shortage” was ready to launch at Citi Ireland. The invites were sent out and with the Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore lined up to speak, the excitement built as we finalised our 150 attendees and distinguished panels. 

In politics as in life, things don’t always go your way and it transpired the Tánaiste was to resign as Labour leader at the same time as the launch event. So Joe Costello, Minister for State ably deputised.

The full report focused on three key areas, making 10 recommendations.

1) Education – Inform and Reform

2) Work – Improve the work environment

3) Culture – Broaden the talent base

Most of these recommendations where beyond Hays control. However, our MD, Richard Eardley,  set Susan and me the challenge of actually affecting change by turning the following recommendation into reality:

• Introduce social mentoring networks for women at all levels of the IT industry

We announced our intention to do this at the launch event and invited people to register their interest. Quite frankly we were astonished by the response.

Foundation of MinT

The challenge with all events like this, is that they are full of good intentions, but don’t often result in action. Susan and I made it our goal to create something meaningful. We realised very quickly that we didn’t possess the knowledge to do this by ourselves, so we set about engaging some enthusiastic experts in this sector to get involved. Fortunately everyone we asked said yes and we owe a great deal to Niambh Scullion (Coderdojo), Dr Marion Palmer (WITS), Jean O’Sullivan and Anne Lanigan (Enterprise Ireland) for helping to take this concept to reality.

We formed a steering committee and set about creating a framework for this mentoring network. We realised that in order to make this reality we would need two things:

1) Money! As Hays objective was only ever to facilitate the launch of the platform and pass over ownership of the network to its members. We required (and still require) organisations to fund and input to governance on an ongoing basis

2) Technology. – We had to find a platform that facilitated the matching of mentees and mentors

Initially we thought getting the money was going to be an easy task. In principle everyone wants to back such a worthwhile initiative. However, when it came to getting sign off from corporate HQ it was considerably more challenging. That is why we want to thank Symantec for becoming the first sponsor to come on board and subsequently the federation of VMWare, EMC & VCE. Their generous support has allowed us to cover the first years operating costs and focus on the success of the network.

Finding a technology platform was considerably easier. We had demos from a number of vendors, but quickly settled on Niamh Bushnell’s company Idirus’ offering.

We now had a steering committee, financial support and the technology in place. The only thing left was to launch the platform. Despite reservations on the timing we settled for a Monday evening in July at the National Concert Hall.

The launch of MinT

Invitations went out to those people who had expressed an interest in being involved and we were overwhelmed by the response. Within a week we had to close the eventbrite link as we became oversubscribed.

Once again fate worked against us, I opened the door on the Monday morning of the launch and there was rain lashing of biblical proportions. As the day progressed the rain eased but the mugginess remained. We arrived at 4.30pm in preparation for the 6pm start with a genuine fear that the event would flop. We should have had more faith, as attendees started to arrive at 5.15pm and by the 6pm kick off there wasn’t a seat left in the house.

Over 100 people attended and so far 40 people have signed up with an almost 50/50 split between mentees and mentors.

What next?

After the launch we have had an approach from a very established technology event to host a Mentoring “Glass Room” event in September. Keep an eye on our twitter handle (@MinTIreland) and the media for updates as the details are released.

We are also very excited about finalising the details of our launch event in Cork after the summer.

Our aim is to have 300 people on the platform by the end of 2015 with 75 mentee/mentor relationships.

To get involved you can follow us on twitter @MinTIreland or sign up to the network.