We’re two-thirds of the way through Women’s History Month, when the spotlight shines on women’s various achievements from politics to athletics, entertainment, business, and in general. But how is the tech industry changing or being challenged to have a successful workplace for women in areas like engineering, development, and design?
At 1Strategy, we’ve been conducting AWS boot camps for a little over eighteen months. We have noticed that the boot camps are predominantly filled with men and decided to create an opportunity for change. Earlier this month, we were inspired with the turnout for our first-ever Women-in-Tech boot camps! During the first and second weeks in March, we held AWS Beginner and Intermediate Boot Camps for women only in Seattle, Washington and Lehi, Utah. We were impressed with the brilliant minds of the women who attended. At one point our CTO, Rich Uhl, told the group that he had never seen one of intermediate day exercises done as well as one of our women’s groups had done it.
The 55 women in attendance have an average of 5 years of experience and represented 28 different companies. The roles of those in attendance ranged from DBA to Automation Lead to DevOps Engineer to IT Security Analyst.
Our sole purposes for these women-specific boot camps were to reach out, educate, and encourage more women, especially in our geographical footprint, to pursue or enhance their cloud computing knowledge while providing them a chance to network with like-minded women.
One attendee, Jocelyn Rosewood (Junior Database Administrator and Business Intelligence Developer at Boostability) said, “This is important for us as women to get together and see that there are women who work in the tech industry. I hope in the future this number will increase so women are not the minority at tech events.”
Women’s History Month is a time to recognize all the women who walked before us and cleared new paths that changed the way women are viewed in our communities and in our workplaces. It’s also a time within our tech community to become a change we want to see.
This month at the ‘Women-in-Tech’ boot camps at Amazon (Seattle) and Adobe (Lehi), we saw part of that change, even the needle moving as these networking consultants, engineers, and developers–all of whom were women–filled and overflowed the rooms to advance their cloud computing knowledge. The site was something our eyes hadn’t seen. Talented technical women are thriving, and we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds!
*Women in Tech boot camps were held March 1 & 2 in Seattle and March 9 & 10 in Lehi.
- Beginner Day covered core concepts in cloud computing with no previous experience is needed. A working knowledge of distributed systems and multi-tier architectures and a familiarity with general networking and cloud computing concepts is needed.
- Intermediate Day had a heavier focus on architecture with the target audience to be those with 6 months to 1+ year of cloud computing experience.
