Wednesday
Room 6
15:00 - 16:00
Workshop (120 min)
Part 2/2: Empowering Your Career: Skills to Shine; Influence to Rise
In today’s fast-paced, unpredictable world, traditional career paths no longer guarantee stability or growth. To thrive, you need actionable strategies to navigate uncertainty, build influence, and continuously develop. This workshop is designed for professionals eager to set their careers up for lasting success.
Through hands-on activities, group discussions, and practical frameworks, you’ll gain the tools to identify your strengths, communicate effectively, and elevate your presence and influence within your organisation.
What You’ll Gain: Develop a personalised career development plan, master communication strategies to handle challenges with confidence, and create a roadmap for building influence and long-term professional success.
Akanksha Malik
Akanksha is a Data and AI Consultant, a Microsoft AI MVP and an international speaker. After studying Financial Maths and Actuarial Science at UCC, Ireland, she realised she wanted to work with people as well as numbers. As a consultant, she works with clients to help them solve problems by making more informed decisions with data.
She is founder of the platform Paths Uncovered, which is aimed at showcasing untraditional pathways into technology and helping people thrive in their tech careers. She is a firm believer of diversity and inclusivity. She loves machine learning, and that it is becoming more accessible to everyone. She is an avid advocate for women in STEM and is currently the network director of Women Who Code Melbourne and advisory board member for Kaleida, a career growth platform.
Gretchen Scott
Gretchen is a founder of Kaleida; the only platform with technology focused career growth architectures designed to help you implement best practice, retain key staff and drive engagement.
Prior to this, she was the Community Manager at Cloudflare which acquired Linc.sh where Gretchen was the Chief Operating Officer, a startup that built a CI/CD tool especially designed for frontend development.
Starting out studying optimisation modelling, which she then used running one of New Zealand's biggest trade shows, she fell in love with software development after graduating a web development bootcamp. Her main passion is bringing more diversity to tech in all it forms such as gender, race, social economic and professional backgrounds. Over the years she has been involved in training more than 250 bootcamp graduates through Coder Academy, is currently a Director at Women Who Code Melbourne and on the Churchill Club Committee.
Susan Brander
Susan is currently the cofounding CTO at Tech Diversity Lab, a start up passionate about bringing greater diversity, belonging and inclusion into the Software Industry.
She has a history of leading teams that delivers a cloud native platforms that balances the need to experiment and learn in an emerging market with reliability expected of customer focused systems.
She is also co-organiser of Tech Leading Ladies in Melbourne, a group focused on bridging the gender gap in technical leadership.