Ignite Your Career Women in IT Webcast

Aside from EnergizeIT, we also have an exciting webcast series coming up in March called Ignite Your Career Webcast Series. They are non-technical webcasts, designed to support Canadian technical professionals in their career development. The webcasts are intended to be very interactive to connect you to the industry experts across Canada.  My colleague Rick who has worked on the past two Ignite Your webcast series share the detailed plan for this year on the canitpro blog.

New this year is the Women in IT Discussion in the webcast series. I had the opportunity to find the following four outstanding women to be my panelists. All of them share the passion for IT, but each of them has a unique career path and is very successful in what they do. Let’s have an open discussion in the webcast. Ask them the questions on your mind or any advice you’d like to get for dealing with challenges at work. If you’d like to send your questions beforehand, please email me at qixing.zheng at microsoft.com. Here are my questions I’d like to pick brains on:

• What did you have to do to prove yourselves among your peers in the industry?
• what are some key professional/career skills you see women often lacking in the IT industry? How can they improve these skills?
• How we can retain women in the field? What’s your secret for a rewarding career in IT?
• In addition to technical roles in IT, what are other exciting career opportunities in IT that the audience should be aware of?
• What are your tips on balancing work and family?

Come and join our discussion on April 7 at 12:00PM EST! Register on the Ignite Your Career website.

 Elisabeth Vanderveldt is co-founder of multi-award winning Conamex International, a Microsoft Gold Certified Excellence partner. An international board member of IAMCP Elisabeth is also the global chair Community and Corporate Citizenship and is the founder of the international Women in Leadership and Technology group. A Microsoft MVP, MCDST, SAM specialist and SBSC PAL, Elisabeth is also on the SBSC advisory council, has been a speaker and panellist at Tech Ed and WPC and is a contributor to Microsoft Momentum and the SBSC Community blog for Canada as well as the SBSC PAL community site. Her passion is to ensure young women see IT as a viable and exciting career opportunity and encourage mentoring among the many successful women currently in the industry.

Shann McGrail is a Business Director reporting to the President of Microsoft Canada. In this role, she is responsible for readiness, communication and business execution for the Canadian subsidiary. Shann has worked in the technology industry for the past 18 years in a variety of disciplines including Sales, Marketing and Technology specialties. During her 11 years at Microsoft, Shann has held a number of positions within the company including Enterprise Sales, Partner Relationship Management and Enterprise Services Management. She is Microsoft Canada’s spokesperson for the Women in I.T. initiative as well as the executive sponsor for Microsoft Canada’s DigiGirlz program, a program designed to inspire young women to consider careers in the technology field.

Betty Johnson has been working in technical support for 10 years and a Microsoft certified professional. She works at Métis Nation of Alberta as their Desktop Support Analyst with extended responsibilities in managing networks and servers in conjunction with the Network Administrator. Her first degree is actually in Nutrition, but her passion for technology allows her to find a rewarding career in IT. She proved a point of women in any age group can make a great impact in IT by hard working and continuous learning.

With Habañero since 2000, Caterina Sanders, Director, User Experience, acts on behalf of end-users to ensure Habañero solutions exceed their needs and expectations. Drawing on her wide variety of business and technical experience, Caterina manages the User Experience team, provides UE leadership for all projects, and conducts project business analysis and project management. Caterina believes Habañero’s strong commitment to user experience in combination with its solid technical abilities ensure clients will receive exceptional business value from any Habañero deliverable.

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