ICT Programs Looking for More Women
It may not look it, but there is a high demand for women to be in the IT field, and some are jumping on that wagon. Especially Renee Cuda.
Credit: theloop.com.au
Renee Cuda told her story to IllawarraMecury. She attended an all-girls high school, and it was there that she found her love of technology. While preparing to graduate from the University of Wollongong, the technology field begins to question what the best approach is in order to attract women into programming jobs, business analysis jobs, or technical writing jobs.
Two interesting facts are that for one thing, in Australia, there are less than one in five women who are enrolled in ICT. The second fact is that in the ICT roles, there is a skill shortage, at the same time there are emerging ones. Some include social media consulting, web designing. Mobile apps development and ethical hacking.
International in UOW’s Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences Associate Dean, Dr. Katina Michael, told Mercury that she believes having more women in the ICT and engineering fields would create a broader range of products that could be introduced to the consumer market.
“Women tend to be lateral thinkers, multi-taskers and highly analytical,” she said.
Ms. Cuda used the gender gap in the ICT program as an advantage in her career. With graduation a few months away, she managed to land a job as an intern software developer at Wollongong firm GBST.
She admitted that she had an easier time landing her career than some of her friends who were studying art or other degrees. “None of her IT peers had that problem,” Mercury stated.
