My first career exposure – a baptism of fire – was working at the family company during summer holidays. My mum had a startup in the education sector, and worked incredibly hard. When you help to build a family business, you develop a deep sense of responsibility and camaraderie. You learn about the entrepreneur’s playbook: innovation, product, market fit and profit and loss. But more importantly you learn about the sacrifice, resilience and the people that helped shape you.
Read more: Lessons from the C-suite: Mel Rodrigues, Creative Access
The worst mistake I made was thinking that a career defines you. It’s almost impossible, as an entrepreneur, to separate yourself from your business. However, to remain resilient, balanced and fun you need a multifaceted identity. It enables you to connect with colleagues and clients on a different level. Six years into my Code First Girls journey, I’ve come to realise that reading Winnie-the-Pooh and Dr Seuss is just as important (if not more important!) as large language models.
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that failing is never as bad as it seems. You can work almost anything out in business. Allow yourself a day to feel the emotion, and then move on. Success is a product of a million incremental failures.
I am humbled and amazed when I hear the success stories of the women that Code First Girls have educated and placed in technology jobs over the years. Some are now protecting our country’s most critical infrastructure from cyber attacks. Some are putting rockets into space. Others have completely transformed their own economic trajectory and sense of opportunity.
The biggest challenge for organisations over the next five years will be upskilling to keep up with technology transformation. Technology is rapidly changing the types of skills we require, and the British Computing Society says it will take 283 years to reach gender parity in technology. All employees will become tech adjacent, which is why we are currently conducting significant large-scale transformation projects in low-code/no-code AI and data skills.
We have a community of 200,000 women coders who we have educated for free, and a community of 130-plus employers who rely on us to pipeline, upskill and reskill technology talent. We speak to hundreds of HR departments every month, often listening to people with challenging transformation needs. Given the complexity of what we hear, I remind my team every day that we hold the responsibility of being trusted advisors to organisations.
I find hiring at a leadership level incredibly hard. In a company of our size, leaders can have a massive impact. It’s important we find people who can thrive against a context of continuous innovation while remaining true to the culture and vision of the company.
More HR leaders would enter the C-suite if they got closer to the business need. My firm is frequently championed and discovered by stakeholders in technology. However, our services simply won’t work unless HR professionals are brought in and help to facilitate the solutions.
There is a common misconception that you can use the same pipeline approach across all parts of the organisation. But people studying computer science have likely worked with only a handful of women, so when they’re further on in their careers, they’ll find it hard to build diverse teams because there were not enough women trained in that field. Senior technology leaders, frequently men, are often desperate to increase diversity. But they need HR to help them.
Right now, I am reading Dr Seuss (The Cat in the Hat is a great read for any tech leader), and business writer Rana Foroohar’s Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech.
My top leadership tip: It’s not the destination, it’s the journey – a phrase coined by one of my favourite writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This article was published in the March/April 2025 edition of HR magazine.
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