Women 2.0 recently approached Alaina Percival for some insight regarding helping female engineers advancing their careers in a male dominated industry. With her own experience in the tech industry as COO and Board Chair of the non-profit organization Women Who Code, she had a wealth of knowledge to share on the subject.
(Women 2.0) – 6 Tips for Female Engineers to Advance Their Careers
It’s no secret that men outnumber women in engineering leadership roles. Women Who Code, a global organization dedicated inspiring women to pursue and excel in technology careers, is aiming to change that. The organization offers free weekly technical study groups and larger monthly events including tech talks, hack nights, and career trainings. In addition to providing a fun and welcoming forum for women to practice and learn new coding skills, organizer Alaina Percival hopes that the WWC events can provide some of the stepping stones to help them better their careers in the future.
I sat down with Alaina, who draws on her experience as the Head of Developer Outreach at the tech recruiting firm Riviera Partners in advising attendees of WWC. “We really want to get women to maintain their careers in a way that’s going to help them advance, even if that’s not an immediate goal,” says Alaina. “There are things you can do along the way that will allow you to advance three to five years down the road.” So it’s not so much standing out when up for a promotion, but the steps along the way to get to that point.