Digital

Empowering Women to Lead Digital Transformation programme – Update

November 17, 2021 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Digital Scotland, Digital Skills

Blog by Sam Cox, Policy Officer, People, Strategy, and Corporate Services Division.

At the end of my last blog post about my experience on the Empowering Women to Lead Digital Transformation programme,  I had recently completed my first two face-to-face learning sessions, one coaching session, and a variety of collaborative team meetings surrounding our group challenge. The group challenge divided all the participants into three teams of eight with each team being given a different topic to explore. Since then, I’ve completed the last of the face-to-face learning sessions, the second of my three coaching sessions, and some more meetings about the group challenge.

I went into the face-to-face days with a significantly higher comfort level than I’d had at the start of the course. I had connected on a personal and professional level with many of the women and I was keen to get to see them again, and to learn more about leadership. There is just something extremely special about being in a room with other smart, driven, and supportive women that makes it easy to be vulnerable about what your strengths and weaknesses are, and to have that sounding board to bounce ideas off of. Beyond gaining a significant amount of confidence in myself and my leadership abilities, I gained an invaluable community of women that I know I’ll be able to leverage and lean on for many years to come.

Because I’m so new to Scottish Government, and overall to my career, I never really thought of myself as a leader, especially because at this point, I don’t have anyone that directly reports to me. However, this course has made me reconsider that, and has made me see that I am a leader in various other ways with my team and the wider organisation. It also gave me an arsenal of tools to use and apply as I continue to learn and grow in my leadership journey. The experience I had in this course was invaluable and I’m keen to continue to apply what I learned.

All that’s left now is one more coaching session and then our in-person graduation day in early December. I’m sad that this course is coming to an end, but I know that the relationships and skills I built will be long lasting. I would encourage any of you reading this to apply to the spring cohort, you will not regret it!

The Empowering Women to Lead Digital Transformation programme is delivered by Empowering You, in association with the Scottish Digital Academy, Scottish Government and ScotlandIS.

You can find the course dates for 2022, here – Empowering You (empowering-you.co.uk)

Tags: digital, Empowering, programme, Transformation, Women

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