I am the Pathway Manager for Games at Access Creative College in Norwich. Access Creative are a network of Further Education colleges across England which run creative-industry specific courses. I contribute to the national curriculum on the further education courses for games and I am passionate about supporting the next generation into technology careers!
How did you end up doing the job you're doing now?
Outside of my ‘day-job’ of event management for a charity, I was also running a community group called Norfolk Game Developers which has monthly meet ups. Through the community of developers in that group I was recommended to Access to start and lead their games courses by multiple people (which still is still lovely to think of now).
If you could say something to yourself before you started a career in tech what would it be?
Technology is always changing, always exciting and something you will never ‘master’ but that is the beauty of it. I did not want to be in a sector whereby you simply learnt all there is to learn and then that’s that – I wanted a career in something which would have new discoveries every day to inspire you and keep you engaged in your work.
What's the most challenging thing you've found about being a woman in tech?
To be honest, this question is one of those challenges. I am a strong believer in “if she can see it, she can be it” and try to be as visible as possible when championing tech to encourage new generations of women to join the industry. That being said, when doing interviews I feel I have to prepare to be asked to act as a voice for ‘all women’ in my industry which is an uncomfortable thing to do sometimes. But, hey – this is the DevelopHER blog, so here are some of my personal thoughts on the subject.
From my previous roles working with early stage startups, I have found that the initial teams formed to create tech businesses often will not feature women as founding members (though this is improving every year). Sometimes this is just circumstantial, but it has a huge knock-on effect. Consider how some of the most successful tech companies often have solely male founders, and how there is still a very low number of women in board-level positions in these companies and organisations. Whilst a lot is being done to ensure that diverse hiring and equal pay practices are in place, the subtle effect of women not seeing more women in these sorts of roles can have a huge impact on whether they would consider themselves in those board-level positions.
Something I have had many young women asking me about when they are considering a career in tech is the availability of maternity support, flexible working options and how having a family might affect their career trajectory. Unfortunately I feel that there is still not enough support available for employers from the government to make maternity leave not a substantial risk for a small business. If one member of a 4-person startup team goes on maternity leave, that is 25% of the ‘workforce’ out of action. An employer needs to ensure the stability and survival of their business, which forces many of them to consider the ‘risks’ of hiring a woman for a role as at the time of writing, there are still certain biological necessities of having children which cannot be shared between partners.
Someone who inspired the hell out of me at a DevelopHER awards night is Juliana Meyer who spoke of how she balanced having her child and continuing to run her business, bringing her baby to meetings and showing what an incredible difference having women in positions of influence can have on the work/family relationship. I thoroughly recommend following Juliana’s work and any of her public speaking.
Lockdown bonus questions:
How has lockdown affected your life and your job? Are you working from home? Furloughed?
Are you enjoying the downtime or can you not wait for things to go back to normal(ish)?
I am teaching from home using Google Meets for sessions with my students and trying to keep them motivated and feeling OK during these challenging times. Work has been more intense than ever and my team (whilst all techies, obviously) are really feeling the loss of human interaction. We love teaching to a room full of rowdy teenage personalities and teaching to a silent (none of them feel comfortable speaking on microphone in a lesson) class took a lot of getting used to. As we move into the summer term though we have some exciting plans to run a game jam with industry mentoring and support, and I am finding ways to fill the silence by having a juke-box of sorts in the first and last ten minutes of my lessons where the students can make (safe for work) music requests.
The photo of me is at my desk – my working from home setup of my life-saver Yeti Microphone, dual monitors and desktop PC – sometimes I’m lucky enough to have the sunshine through my window!
