Helping adesso in its work to recruit women for expert and management positions in IT is a matter close to the coach’s heart: “I want to use my experience to give women the courage to live their strengths, even if it means choosing less traditional training routes. I myself learnt that it is worth it.”
Currently, around 16 percent of all software engineers and IT consultants at adesso are women. This number almost corresponds to the percentage of women in professional IT roles throughout Germany (17 percent, source: BITKOM), but adesso would still like to continually work to increase this amount and hire more women for management positions in future Volker Gruhn is Supervisory Board Chairman, founder of adesso and professor for software technology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is familiar with this situation in his day-to-day work at the university. “Overall, women are still under-represented in information technology, but that number is growing. We want to actively support this trend and target women with our range of options. Studies show that mixed-gender teams are more motivated, more creative and perform better. They develop a better understanding of the needs of our customers, both male and female.”
To attract women to join the company and better support them in their work-life balance, adesso has put together a compact package of measures. These actions range from school sponsorship and direct communications to target groups at universities and at trade fairs, company tours for students, internal company mentoring programmes and women’s networks through to targeted family-friendly measures. These include, among other things, providing parent-child offices at adesso locations, entitlement to part-time working hours and extended child sickness allowance.
For national coach, Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, these steps are exactly what is needed: “It would please me greatly to assist adesso with this initiative in the near future.”
