Working within a professional network

Creating networks, advanced training, discovering new technologies

The professional network is vital to women working in new technologies, to learn from each other and to manage their careers. ADA seeks to identify and bring together the women working in IT - there are 10,000 of them in Belgium after all –to help them get to know each other and increase their impact, and to become involved in mentor schemes with their juniors. Indeed there is a great shortage of models for young women in these jobs.

Perfecto : advanced training for trainers
The new technologies are evolving rapidly and it is difficult for training centres and professional integration centres to finance and organize training for their staff to keep up with these changes. In order to enable these teachers – who are often self-taught – to progress in more specialized fields, they need to have access to quality training. Every year, the ADA project helps finance around a hundred days of advanced training in IT for teachers from training bodies. The aim is to enable women to progress in technical disciplines so that women who are in the process of training can identify themselves to their teachers. The modules include : Microsoft certification in network administration, different programming languages (XML, ASP, PHP, visual basic) and database design.

Saturday academies
Technical workshops are organized several times a year on a Saturday to allow women working in IT to discover new technologies. The aim is two-fold : to tackle a new technical content, and to enable women to meet and exchange experiences.

A number of different subjects have been tackled in the Saturday academies since they first began, and the subject of the 2006/2007 academy is open software. Women who have no job security and have no guaranteed access to technologies or training need free, open tools that allow them to learn in a collective environment and outside the formal environments. We must have command – or at least be given the opportunity to have command - of these tools and therefore of the standards that define our work with technological tools. The sphere of open software is no different from any other ; women are poorly represented in it.