September 30th 2009 event 4 at Dell

This, the 4th in the Connecting Women in Technology series, raised the quality bar even further for Connecting Women as this piece of feedback shows:

I just wanted to say, thank you again for all of your efforts in coordinating today. It was very enlightening to join the session and I am really glad I made the effort to take the time out to attend, when often it is too easy to think, I’m just too busy! From attending this session, I would a) recommend it to another colleague b) attend another. 🙂

Over 200 women (and 5 men) attended the meeting, this time Dell hosted the event at their offices in Bracknell.  We’ve settled on a simple format, Introduction, Keynote, main session, workshop session and extended coffee break to allow the attendees time to Network.  The main session, hosted by me, was about discovering your strengths by using Johari.  i split the audience up into groups of 6 to ask and give feedback and learn to reveal their facades.

  

Ingrid from Dell hosted a quick session showing how to join closed and open conversational groups and how to hone your networking skills 

Theresa May delivered our keynote for 30 minutes,sharing facts and figures about the fact that the number of women in the workplace was dropping each year, and sharing some things we could do to reverse this decline.  The audience really warmed to her and her messages were spot on with regards to women in the workplace and encouraging more women to get involved in the science, engineering and technology professions – it has certainly given us some ideas around how else we can contribute as women in the technology profession.

We asked for one word from the attendees  to describe the session.  Some amazing words came out:

Strength, Connecting, Awareness, Assertive, Confidence, Enthusiasm, Openness, Motivation

So remember these ladies, next time you’re in a difficult situation,

Now we’re starting to plan the next session at Intel which will be held in Intel’s Swindon offices in late April 2010.  I’ll blog what we’re planning to do when we get the agenda sorted out  and toasted our success at this meeting with some wine and champagne.  We will also be celebrating the fact that companies who compete so actively in business could have become amazingly close firm friends 🙂