Category: Diversity

We set up Women’s Tech Hub to increase diversity in the industry and we do that through support, networking, training, workshops, and interfacing with companies. We run the tech3shed careers fair especially to try and make careers fairs more accessible and approachable for all (we’ve all been ignored at recruitment stands for not being their idea of what an engineer looks like right!?).

With the current situation we know that the likelihood of running a recruitment fair live is pretty unlikely this year and possibly into the next year so we are working around it. Obviously at the moment its a difficult time for recruiting due to the precariousness of the economy and various industries which have knock on effects to other service providers etc. But we are also aware that, as with many a crisis, there are plenty of companies who are thriving under lockdown and are looking to recruit and grow.

We are working on moving the recruitment fair online moving forward in a similar manner to how we run the Workshop Wednesdays. There will be opportunities for companies to present themselves to the members online and advertise their jobs when recruiting or simply give themselves a presence in the city with the community.

Currently, though we have plenty of amazingly talented women looking to work in great companies that embrace inclusive cultures. We are not a recruiter and therefore will not knowingly place women in companies that have a poor reputation around fairness just to make a quick buck. We are charging for the introductions based on placements but we are far cheaper than recruiters and believe that asking for companies to support our group and keeping it free for the women is the way that things should be in life! You can check out the women on our candidate’s page here.

Workshop Wednesdays

We are starting to get into the swing of these and had some great feedback from the last one so are putting together a list of fields of interest and speakers.

The next one will be on the 3rd of June (yes its almost June!!) and will host

• The 2nd Business Analyst workshop by Sara Price
• A User experience talk by Amy a UX designer at Dyson
• Python Beginners
• We’ll have a webdev 101 room for anyone wanting to talk web development
• We have a new group joining us on software testing
• We are happy to host other rooms if you want to discuss projects etc

Projects that you can support:

We are happy to do a shout out at the wednesdays fr projects that you may want to get involved with. The current ones are below:

The lockdown economy are considering how to move towards other solutions such as a Lockdown Economy merchandise shop. Its a UX designer running it for free currently so maybe also looking at how it could be monetised in some way may be good.

The Bristol Tech Fair is our website for the event that we ran last year in collaboration with Technotopia. As we are moving online and the name of the site is pretty child friendly we are looking to change it into a child tech resource-based site. There are lots of resources out there supporting kids in tech so making this a central resource makes sense. Anyone wanting to improve their website skills let us know. We will set up a Trello board for people wanting to put in ideas, it is currently a WordPress site.

So we guess the can we go back yet was a bit of a ‘yeah but no’ moment. We spotted some tap dancing members out there playing so we’re really glad you are all keeping your spirits up mostly!

Workshop Wednesdays

To further keep your spirits up check out this week’s Workshop Wednesday lineup here an absolute essential if you are job hunting at the moment and anyone wanting to understand a BA role then a brilliant workshop/presentation on that. The main part will not have video except for the presenters so no need to put clothes/makeup/smile on .. and we’ll mute you to avoid overhearing your partners saying how much they would love a purple catsuit .. we didn’t hear that on Friday honest!! 🙉

There will also be a Python beginners course at 7:30pm. This is in addition to the workshops already scheduled here: https://www.wthub.org/workshop/workshop-wednesday-lineup-on-the-20th-of-may/
The intention is to follow an online Python Course, with fortnightly workshops to go over the course material with the opportunity to ask questions, share coursework etc.
The coming Wednesday will be the kick-off meeting where the specific course will be confirmed (based on initial ideas but also taking on board any feedback/preferences of attendees), agree the pace of learning, settle communication method inbetween workshops etc.
If you would like to join please sign up to Workshop Wednesday meetup link above – it’s open to all genders. If you can’t make the first meeting but are still interested, then you are very welcome to attend subsequent workshops.

The following one we are currently putting together and hopefully will include Tableau & Data visualization for current Excel users by Gabs#1 – again (TBC) and the 2nd BA workshop by Sara Price. We are currently looking at interest in Python and Webdev101 coming back.

We are also sharing projects that people can be involved with to up their skills and put on their portfolios, so if you have something you are working on and need help with you can do a callout at the meeting and we can set up breakout rooms for you to discuss.

New TechTalks platform .. and its free for us!!

On that note Adam Butler who runs the Bristol JS group has been busy putting together an app to support event organizers manage things a bit better!

TechTalks is more than just an events platform. It’s a home for your community. Sessions such as talks, panels and hackathons have so much value and shouldn’t just disappear or go elsewhere when the day is over. TechTalks can be a home to the content that you and your community create.

If you’re a tech event organiser then we’ve got your back. You’ll soon be able to accept or discover talk proposals for your community. It will be seamless, all the control with none of the copy and pasting. That’s just for starters, a whole host of tools will be available to make running your events more efficient and better than ever.

As a speaker, you can build and grow your personal brand, host your content and publish your speaking schedule. Soon you’ll also be able to get insightful metrics and feedback on your sessions too.

Oh, one more thing. TechTalks is also a community itself. I’m a strong believer in getting product feedback early. I’ve made our roadmap public and we’ll be hosting regular remote sessions to find out what our community wants from TechTalks.

This is just a start, but an exciting one. Not everything is ready right now but there is a vision and we’re moving fast towards it. Join us and be a part of it.

Women’s Tech Hub are available for support online in place of our Free Three Fridays (F3F) for zoom catch-ups. Sign up on our meetup here or mail us on info@wthub.org for details.

We are also aware that we need to up our efforts into getting our members into work – for now we have our candidates page here but we are working on being a bit louder moving forward so bear with us for now while we put it together.

We know its starting to get a bit like groundhog day for those furloughed or housebound during this period. Others are simply working flat out and hearing how others are spending their time cutting the individual grass on their lawn with hair scissors for the perfect looks or hand fashion their own homemade toilet seats or whatever the latest trend is. But at least there’s a lot of stuff on and if we can’t come out to play then its the virtual playground/workshops from home (at least there’s no traffic!)

Workshop Wednesday (and F3F)

Seems like there are loads of ideas and offers for workshops out there. The first will be a “Job applications (CVs, LinkedIn, portfolios)” by Gabriella Morales (Gabs #1) on the 20th of May from 6.15 til 7.15pm Followed at 7.30 to 8.30pm workshop #1 of 2 by Sara Price on what a BA does. We are just putting together the details and setting up the meetup so bear with us on the details.

We then have #2 of 2 by Sara on the following one and Tableau & Data visualization for current Excel users by Gabs#1.

On top of that we are currently organising:

• How to Twitch (its a platform btw)
• Git
• SQL databasing
• Google analytics
• UX
• Agile/lean intro
• Cloud/AWS vs google vs azure
• Flutter?

plus all the ones we mentioned in last weeks newsletter of course!

Women’s Tech Hub are available for support online in place of our Free Three Fridays (F3F) & Workshop Wednesdays for zoom catch-ups. Sign up on our meetup here or mail us on info@wthub.org for details.

A couple of our members who normally lead some workshops at Workshop Wednesdays are in the speaker linup for Women in Data Science | IBM Code Bristol so go check them out:

Dr. Elena Hensinger – Senior Data Scientist will discuss real-life challenges with time-series data and discuss ways to provide value to your client, no matter the quality of data.

Alexandra Craciun – Audio Algorithms Engineer at XMOS will look into voice activity detection and discuss optimisation approaches for designing an efficient low-power algorithm to detect speech.

Digitalmums have just announced that they have been funded to support women on free boot camps for women who are in roles that are at risk through automation – check it out here Free Digital Bootcamps for mothers in at-risk retail roles