OK. Um It's 10 past nine. So I'm assuming that I'm live. It would be good if somebody could ping me, if they can hear me on the chat. I'm live. Thank you very much. Indeed, everybody. Well, hello everyone.I'm Andrew Gates, Vice President of Culture and people at in SOO. I'm thrilled to be speaking to you today as part of this conference that brings together women in tech and our allies across the globe in today's session. I'm focusing on mentorship, allyship and how we can inspire the next generation of tech talent in the spirit of collaboration and learning from each other. I'm going to leave plenty of room at the end for questions and discussion to kick us off though. It's worth taking a step back to consider why mentorship is so important? More than just an internal initiative that goes behind closed doors. Mentorship is integral to the ongoing success of the technology industry as well as mentoring within organizations, providing mentorship to people.

Looking to start a career in tech is a crucial way to build the talent pipeline and to make that talent pipeline more diverse according to specialist recruitment group Hayes and other specialist recruitment groups are available. 86% of employers have experienced skills shortages in last year.

I'm sure many of us have witnessed these shortages and the resulting difficulties in hiring firsthand, opening up opportunities for people from diverse and under underrepresented backgrounds is one important way to tackle the ongoing skills shortage in tech and making mentorship opportunities available for prospective tech workers can be part of the solution.

So what is mentorship, mentorship comes in many different forms. It can take place within an organization or across organizational boundaries. Mentoring can happen informally or can be facilitated in a more formal setting. Typically, a mentor will be someone with more professional experience than the mentee.

But opportunities exist for reverse mentoring as well where someone younger or more inexperienced mentors, a more senior person across all types of mentoring. There are common conditions that help the process to be as fruitful and successful as possible. One of the most important factors for building strong mentoring relationship is making time for one another. Mentoring is about mutual trust and respect and each party needs to trust the other is willing to carve out time and space for them. It's also worth noting that mentoring is generally not the same as coaching, coaching is usually provided by line managers or team leaders and it's about solving problems and escalating any issues to higher management mentoring. On the other hand, is about providing that safe space for someone to share what's on their mind and to ask questions or explore topics they don't understand. Mentoring can be 1 to 1 and often works well in that format. But it can also take place in group settings. As mentioned, mentoring happens outside organizations as well as within them. A great example of external mentoring initiative that I've had. The pleasure to be involved with is Future Frontiers. Future Frontier is an, is an education charity that works with schools and businesses in the UK to provide professional role models to students aged 14 to 16, aimed at young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The scheme equips students with the knowledge and skills to achieve their potential at school and to p uh to pursue their chosen career paths in Sona has supported future frontiers for the past four years with our staff volunteers mentoring one or two students each for six weeks, every February.

The experience is extremely valuable for the young people involved who receive support in researching different career paths and understanding the opportunities available to them. Our mentors also benefit while significant work and preparation is involved over the six weeks of sessions, they get much out of the experience.

And as a result, we never have trouble getting people to sign up for the next year. Whilst future frontiers is about building a working relationship with a young person over time, other initiatives offer the chance to provide mentorship to wider groups through events and workshops.

Aws run a regular series of workshops for girls aged 12 to thir 12 to 13 called AWS. Get It. This program brings together teams from schools to compete in an app building contest to solve real issues. Girls who get involved receive cons consistent guidance from Aws experts and build up a strong bank of expertise on what career in tech has to offer them. The results speak for themselves. By the end of 2020 Aws estimates that more than 23,000 students from 136 schools have taken part. That's astonishing. It's great. Your future, your ambition is another such initiative aimed at supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into stem careers, which is science, technology, engineering and the arts, as well as maths. And so I have seen the stunning benefits of getting involved with your futures.

Your ambition, we encourage staff at all stages in their careers to get involved. All those who take part, feel a strong sense of responsibility to enthuse younger people about careers in our sector and show them the different paths available to get into tech. For me, it's been fantastic to see the ens enthusiasm shown by our staff who have been involved in these external mentoring opportunities. It really highlights something fundamental about the mentoring process. The mentor mentee relationship is always reciprocal, both parties are always learning within organizations.

It's important to nurture that culture of reciprocal learning and understand we've talked about how mentoring can be both informal and formal within the workplace. Both forms need to be given the chance to flourish. And that means organizations must have the right infrastructure to facilitate these different types of mentoring. For formal mentoring. Significant groundwork is needed. These foundations need to be set down by the training and development function, the driving force for the internal mentorship program in most organizations.

The first step is ensuring that everyone involved has a clear understanding of their role and what's expected of them from the start. This can be easily achieved by asking everyone who wants to take part to put in an application. This will help expedite the process of deciding about who to match together as a general rule. It's best to match people with a mentor or mentee outside their core department so that they can have experience that is separate from the people who they interact with every day. Also try to match people with complementary styles and approaches as well as giving you more information about the person and what they want from the mentoring process. Getting people to fill in an application shows that someone is willing to make a commitment. As I mentioned at the beginning, making time is the most important thing a mentor and mentee can do for each other. Establishing a level of commitment from the beginning is an important foundation that sets every pairing up for success. Once some mts and mentors have been matched with each other. The process can begin at in Sunno, it runs for a 12 month period with various check ins. Along the way, it's absolutely critical to provide mentors and mentees with a bank of resources to draw from ranging from learning materials. Um cos they can be difficult and time consuming to produce. So having those readily available amplifies the process for mentors and mentees.

The hardest thing for mentors who are new to the program is understanding that they're not there to solve their mentees problems. Mentors soon come to realize that their role involves putting someone else first and centering that person's thoughts and feelings. This can be challenging, encourage, but it's usually valuable skill to learn. And it's also incredibly rewarding when a mentor is encouraged to focus their energy on someone else and their learning, this builds empathy and compassion and enriches the mentor skills as a people leader.

So we know that a lot of ground work goes on in setting up a successful mentorship program. But what about informal mentorship while it's undeniably valuable for organizations to set up formal mentorship programs? It's important a company's culture is equally equipped to facilitate more informal mentorship.

At some point in our careers, we've probably all experienced, been taken under the wing of a colleague or manager who looks out for us, encourage us to progress and helps us to grow in confidence. These kinds of informal mentoring relationships can be just as valuable as formal mentorship programs and have the potential to greatly enrich our careers. The type of mentoring we will most benefit from at any given point will depend on individual circumstances and factors such as where we are in our career, much like different muscle groups. Uh We need different forms of exercise to grow stronger, different types of mentoring will develop different strengths and we don't necessarily need all types of mentoring all the time. That's it. Organizations do need to facilitate different forms of mentorship so that employees can access the support they need when it suits them, companies must foster an inclusive and collaborative culture to allow informal mentorship connections to form and flourish. Such a culture should be founded on the core principles of allyship in an environment where colleagues consciously act as allies, people feel able to bring new thinking and new perspectives to the table.

Allies can help amplify the voices of those who are traditionally underrepresented and help counter bias, whether it's unconscious or otherwise. Building this kind of culture starts from the top. Leaders must send the message to their employees that if it matters to you, it matters to us.

This message needs to be genuine and people in the business must feel that they can voice what's important to them and be heard for leaders. The most important thing is Avai is to listen and give employees their time when anyone asks R MD in the UK. If he's available. He'll always say all I've got is time. I think this sends a clear message that every employee matters to him and that he is there to listen to their, their ideas and concerns. As part of building a culture that encourages feedback and collaboration. Businesses can put different structures in place to facilitate the sharing of ideas. Whenever whatever measures we take as organizations to facilitate mentoring and reciprocal learning, we must embrace the core values of curiosity, collaboration, inclusivity, and allyship. These values enable the tech sector to continue to thrive.

Importantly, they also lay the foundation for new and underrepresented perspectives to come to the fore. This takes us right back to why mentorship is so important. It provides opportunities to lift up each other to learn from each other to grow together at a time when technology's capabilities are growing faster than ever before, we must continue to make time to take a step back, reflect and listen only by sharing our knowledge and hearing other perspectives.

Will the tech sector continue to innovate and grow? Thank you for listening. I'm happy to take any questions and thoughts if we don't have any questions and thoughts, OK. We do have one come through. Um from Emma Fenwick, what qualities do you think a good mentor should have?

So we've established Emma that they do need to make sure that they can provide the appropriate amount of time um to be equipped to be a mentor um and to make sure that they are consistent with giving that time um and prepared to have a very open mind about what's in front of them.

So I think those two things would be the starting point for any mentor who wanted to start out on that road map. Um Kim, I appreciate uh you don't have a formal mentoring program and a lot of companies don't. And, and it's, it's a, it's a really good place to start. Um In our company, our formal mentoring program started off with a group of women in India. Um So, you know, we've expanded that out and I would encourage you to partner with anybody in your training and development team if you have a training and development function to help build out materials and some structure. So any good program needs structure a starting point and, and a set of expectations. Um So I think that planning initially is, is pretty key that you probably need to spend a good six weeks in the planning phase um Before you're ready to start to launch a program, even a relatively uh in informal one initially. OK. If we have any more questions, I'll happily take them or feel free to email me at any point. Um I think we just got one more through. OK? What role can mentoring play in supporting recruitment? Well, I think that's a great question.

Um I think with a mentoring program in place particularly people joining a business earlier in their career will feel very confident that there's mentoring available to them to help them progress as quickly as possible and get, you know, inside tracks on things. They may not get through their direct management strain uh chain in an organization. So it can be a real selling point when you're trying to recruit talent from the market, particularly in today's challenging times. Um I think Chelsea, I know sometimes we have to sell it, don't we?

We have to sell the need for mentoring into our businesses that people appreciate. This investment in time is worthwhile. I think um talent is everywhere and taking every opportunity to develop talent, particularly diverse, talent is absolutely key. So any business that thinks that, you know, mentoring is, is, is, is not needed, but perhaps missing the angle of looking after a nurturing talent and it's far better to be able to have a talent pipeline that you can grow from within rather than constantly going to the market.

We all know the market's crazy right now. Um I'm sure it'll settle down, but, you know, we're victims of market market rates at the moment where nurturing talent from within is really an investment that's so good to make internally. So, you know, I think it does cover itself really if you can retain and develop talent internally. Thanks Chelsea, good luck with setting up your program. I'm sure it will be a huge success. OK. I think that's all the questions. Oh Another one just come through. OK. Reverse mentoring, Serena. Thank you for that question. Um I think it's very important and it's something that can be done either in a group setting or in a, in a, in individual program as well. Um Sometimes reverse mentoring can happen at a group wide level um with a, a group of people that are early in career, shadowing another group that are more experienced and working on projects together. I've seen those environments work really well from reverse mentoring as well as individual uh programs. I think we're always learning. Um And it's very refreshing to spend time with people at a different stage of the career than you're at yourself. Um I know from the future frontiers program just the uh it was just delightful to spend time with a young person and help them um take the next steps uh in terms of planning for their future.

Um And as a mother of four grown up kids now, um it was far easier working with those young students than it was with any of my own Children. So, you know, that's something I would call out. It's hugely rewarding. Um This question around uh women who code women, data science, mentorship. I think it's absolutely vital for people who are in that side of the technical uh industry, have mentorship and networking opportunities. Uh Otherwise, otherwise, it can feel quite a lonely place. We know that women particularly are still very underrepresented in these roles and it shouldn't be the case. So as I said, great shout out to Aws and a lot of other larger companies who are doing a great job in that effort. Um There's a question around practical tips to encourage collaborative and inclusive behavior, employees. Um I think in terms of rewarding people and noticing the values of that they demonstrate about collaboration and inclusivity. I think there needs to be recognition for when they've done that.

Well, we're very good at praising people for performing and achieving goals and objectives and whatever that might be. And, and you know, financial metrics of course are important. But we've also got to call out when we've seen collaboration and, and call it out as something we're proud of.

Um And, you know, we try very hard to, to do that in so, and it's something we keep pushing to try and do more of rewarding people for how they behave and not just results, Mary's uh centrelink through for mentoring dot uh dash club.com, which looks like well worth a look for anybody that's uh interested in finding out more.

And I know I'll go and take a look at that after this session. Thank you, Mary. All right. I think we are now at time. So thank you for all your questions. If anybody wants to connect with me outside of this session, feel free to do so. And thank you very much. Indeed. Bye bye and have a great day.