Femgineers Build Street Cred

Last Tuesday, Femgineer hosted its last forum of the year at Wealthfront. The forum proved to be our most attended with over 60 people in the audience. WealthFront did a great job welcoming the community of Femgineers! Femgineers were greeted with an interactive registration display that showed their names all throughout the wall’s television monitors and displayed live tweets about the event throughout the evening.

Besides the food and festive networking, many got a glimpse at Wealthfront and their company culture. Team members actively introduced themselves and readily shared what they enjoy most about working at Wealthfront.

After an hour, everyone found their seats to listen in to our main topic of the night “Building Street Cred” by former VP at Adobe, Karen Catlin. Karen presented metrics and tactics to help Femgineers stand out in front of prospective employers.

At one point the discussion turned to what people should and shouldn’t show on their LinkedIn profiles. To the audience’s surprise there were a number of LinkedIn employees present, who happily answered their questions! The LinkedIn employees reassured the audience that you don’t have to be overly concerned with what people in your office might think as you update your profile. One of the LinkedIn employees told the audience that there are just too many updates to keep up with, and it can be hard for others to know your true intent.

As the presentation transitioned to Q & A, many posed questions about finding ways to beef up their own “street cred” in terms of their own situation. Karen suggested ways for improvement as well as tailoring some of the lessons from the presentation. In addition, the community of Femgineers shared feedback from their own personal experience afterwards.

As always we have a break out session, which gives Femgineers a chance to put into practice what they just learned from the talk. Plus they get a chance to network more intimately with peers, and receive feedback.

Keeping up with the excitement and level of engagement from the Q & A, a surprising number of Femgineers came to the front to share their group way of handling street cred. Even those that weren’t inclined to talk, mustered up the courage and began to share. Many felt it was a great way for them to practice their public speaking skills.

In the end the event proved to be our best forum ever, and went beyond expectations for both Femgineer and Wealthfront. We plan to continue hosting forums next year, and building momentum towards our goal of changing the ratio and empowering more female engineers everywhere!

Get a behind the scenes look at what went into producing this Femgineer Forum!

Related articles

• A New Frontier for Femgineer
• Building Your Street Cred, Femgineer Forum Oct 22 2013

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