Last Thursday, the Careers department took a group of 15 young women from Years 9-11 to a ShadowTech day event.
ShadowTech is an event where Secondary schools are paired up with a local tech organisation and students spend the day learning about the company and the opportunities in the tech industry. With women making up only 27% of the IT workforce, starting from only 39% taking NCEA technology at school. Programmes like this help break down barriers and myths that girls may have about the industry.
The 15 girls spent a full day at Seequent headquarters on Moorhouse Ave. Seequent has offices worldwide and creates and integrates world-leading earth modelling, geo-data management, and team collaboration software. Seequent was an incredibly generous host and put on a fantastic day for the girls. The group started the day with a tour of the workplace. We then moved on to a question-and-answer session about the company and to learn a little about what they did. A panel of women from the workplace spoke to the girls and told them about their interesting and varied pathways into Seequent and the Tech industry. Seequent kindly provided the girls with a beautiful morning tea and lunch. In between the sessions, employees from the company came along to eat cake and meet the students. A couple of very friendly dogs also joined in. Throughout lunch there was plenty of opportunity to try a hands-on activity with the ipad and HoloLense. And in the afternoon, students played an around-the-world game that had been organised to showcase some of the countries Seequent works in.
There was plenty of opportunity throughout the day to mingle with staff to ask questions. Everyone at Seequent made a huge effort to interact with the students and make them feel welcome.
When the girls were asked what they took away from the day they had the following to say. “Using the headsets and doing the continental activity was really fun”. “When I revealed that I wanted to be a fashion designer someone told me how I could incorporate tech into fashion”. “Later in your career you probably won’t do what you think you will do when you start your first jobs”. “You don’t have to have your life all planned out at our age to do well in life”.
