IT TAKES A GUIDING LIGHT TO FIND A WAY THROUGH THE DARKNESS by David Braue
Mentoring comes in many forms so make sure yours is working for you.
F
or all the talk about how to solve the
shortage that we were attracting a lot of women mid-
diversity crisis in IT, it is easy to forget that
career and retraining them.”
the industry has suffered skills gaps before and, as Leonie Valentine remembers from
Her organisation had an influx of mid-career nurses,
her own experience, become stronger for it.
teachers and “people who just decided they wanted to be in tech.” It invested heavily in retraining those
Valentine was one of many women who joined the
women to become testers, project managers, project
tech industry in the late 1990s, and “sort of fell into
co-ordinators and take on other roles.
technology” as the industry raced to recruit enough staff to address challenges such as the dot-com
“Over time, we actually got them into the higher-skilled
explosion and the Y2K Bug. She believes today’s
positions,” said Valentine, adding that her current
skills-starved tech executives should learn from
organisation maintains pathways from frontline roles
the strategies adopted by their counterparts two
“into what we would call the support office.”
decades ago. She said a few technology team members had Valentine is a former Kaz, Telstra, CSL and Google
come from those frontline roles. “We’ve trained them
executive. She was Australia Post’s executive
up based on their desires. We can support their
general manager for customer experience and
education, and help them through.”
digital technology and now manages a tech-heavy
58
team of more than 70 people. She told the recent
This approach to hiring differs from many companies
ATSE Activate conference, “We had such a dire skills
that evaluate technical candidates based on lists of
W O M E N I N S E C U R I T Y M A G A Z I N E
M A R C H • A P R I L 2023