GRETCHEN Shipman received some valuable career advice from an executive in her last role that she has never forgotten.
"He said 'Whenever a learning opportunity such as a secondment, or a transfer, or a course comes up I've always said yes, because from every new experience you learn so much'," said Ms Shipman, a senior legal counsel with the Newcastle Permanent who has been seconded to the merger project with the Greater Bank.
"It can be a bit daunting, but I always have the mindset of 'You can do it' and you never regret taking these things on... you always get positive learning experiences."
Ms Shipman, 44, has put her hand up to take on a new challenge, as one of 19 women who will study a Diploma of IT or Diploma of Data Analytics at the University of Newcastle.
UON received $479,000 in funding last November as part of the federal government's Women in STEM Cadetships and Advanced Apprenticeships Program.
The funding will provide the 19 women working at Honeysuckle Health, Camplify, Image Cloud and Newcastle Permanent with a fully-funded place to study one of the two diplomas, as well as paid study leave.
UON will launch its Women in STEM Cadetships Program on Tuesday at its Callaghan campus.
Ms Shipman studied commerce and law at UON before moving to Sydney as a law graduate. She worked at a series of firms in Sydney and London and the Commonwealth Bank before she joined Newcastle Permanent four and a half years ago.
"I've had a hunger for more experience with technology for quite a while but I just wasn't sure how to go about it," Ms Shipman said.
"I negotiate information security clauses in our contracts and they can be quite technical, like penetration testing [to check for gaps in a cyber security framework] and certification and I work with our cyber security team on that, but as a lawyer you know all the theory but actually being able to see how penetration testing works or how cyber security can be breached and protected, I think seeing that in practice, as opposed to drafting an agreement that says what people are meant to do, it's totally different."
She said instances of fraud were increasing across the world.
"Looking at how we can use technology to combat that, whether it's through data analytics so we can identify customers being targeted for scams earlier and try and help them avoid losses, I think that's going to be an increasing focus."
She said regulators were expecting banks to do more proactive analysis of breaches and complaints to identify trends and fix them earlier.
UON Associate Professor in Computing Karen Blackmore said the program would be beneficial for both employees who wanted to upskill or reskill and employers who wanted more diversification in their teams and faced a skills shortage in information and communication technologies, which covers areas including IT, computer science and software engineering.
"Our research tells us that the pathway for young girls from high school into computing careers is challenging, at best it hovers around 25 or 26 per cent female participation so it's not a natural choice for a lot of women but once they enter organisations it becomes clear, really clear, the benefits that can be derived by increasing their skills and moving into those digital and computing roles within their organisations," Associate Professor Blackmore said.
"Our employers are also seeking greater diversity in those teams and it's really critical because a lot of key decision making is being driven by the data processing, the software implementations that are happening within the IT space and so we're seeing numerous examples where we fail to deliver fully if we don't have balanced and diverse teams developing and implementing those systems.
"Employers legitimately struggle to direct employ and so taking those areas where the women within an organisation, they're demonstrating interest and they're demonstrating capacity, this is providing an educational pathway into those teams."
Associate Professor Blackmore said there were many reasons why girls weren't entering the field.
"It's complicated, if it was simple we would have solved it," she said.
"We know the greatest influence on young people's career choices and particularly young women in computing is maternal influence ... so it's a self fulfilling prophecy, we cannot be what we cannot see.
"We also have a lot of stereotypes still that feed into the computing area where it's stereotyped and the people who fulfill those roles are stereotyped as being very different from the skillsets that are actually needed.
"Yes we need technical skills but we also need people with people skills in these roles."
She said there needed to be "a multi faceted approach in order to increase the pipeline".
"We traditionally tend to over focus on our school leavers as being the core source of where we will, in the future, in coming years, address the skills shortage we're seeing.
"But we also have highly competent highly capable people already in our workforce who perhaps just need a program like this, something like this which is an enabling program that allows them to make that leap, that transition where they've obviously been highly successful within their organisations already."
She said there'd been an increase in employers "reaching back" into UON and offering funded cadetship programs to attract students.
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