Women in IT

This year the shortfall in the number of qualified IT engineers in the European Union will hit 300,000. Despite the obvious need for skilled professionals in the sector, only 19% of the IT and telecommunications workforce is female. That situation does not appear likely to change soon, with only 10% of A Level Computer Studies students being women.

But one IT network specialist based in Yorkshire is proof that women and a career in IT mix perfectly well.

“It’s not exactly clear why so few women look for a career in IT” says Shirley Firth, Financial Director of Leeds-based SICL. “There is an unwarranted misconception that IT is a male domain and there is possibly not enough being done in schools and colleges to promote a career in the industry to girls and young women.  This is a shame as women are as equally suited to a career in IT as their male counterparts”.

Samantha Paylor, who graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University in summer 2009, believes a technical role in IT is well suited to the talents and qualities usually associated with the female of the species. Sam, 22, is the first woman to work for SICL in a technical role and she provides helpdesk support for clients.

Sam says: “I’m pretty new to the role but it’s going really well. I enjoy the technical side of the industry. Trouble shooting and solving problems for customers means I can put my knowledge and interests in to practice.

“I became interested in IT through my computing lessons during high school. I found that I could pick it up quite easily and became more interested in the different areas and aspects of computing. I then decided that this is the career path that I wanted to follow due to the wide variety and nature of the industry.”

Whilst Sam is SICL’s only female technician at present, Shirley Firth is keen to attract more women to the business.

Shirley is one of five female employees at SICL, which is an SME with 30 staff. The ratio of female employees is unusually high in the industry. SICL’s focus on employee participation – the business is an Investors in People exemplar – makes it a popular place to work and staff retention rates are well above the industry average.
“We would love more women to apply for technical roles with us. They have the skills and the abilities to do the work well. Plus, that balance in gender in the business brings added advantages because women bring a different perspective to our teams and how we work.”

Carrie Williams is another example of an SICL employee who is making a success of an IT career.

Carrie started at SICL in 2006 in a sales and business development role. Nine months later, her passion for conservation led to her spending six months in Fiji working on a project. When she came back to the UK two years ago, she took up SICL’s offer to rejoin the business and re-trained in a Project Management role.

She says: “I manage the implementation of our projects for clients. I help manage the installations to time and budget. “That’s very important for our customers and makes mine an important role with the business.

“It’s challenging but women generally are good Project Managers. We are good planners, think logically and are good communicators. These skills are ideal for a project management role in IT.”

Shirley, who spent a period of her career in manufacturing, says the predominance of men in the profession should not act as a bar to women. “In my experience IT is a more male dominated industry than manufacturing. We can change that though, as our business is demonstrating.” She says.

“I would like to see schools and colleges do more to encourage women to explore technology as a career because there’s absolutely no reason why they should not be able to succeed in the technical roles.

“The industry has a great need for skilled people. Encouraging more girls and young women to bring their skills and qualities to the sector would be a good starting point in addressing that shortfall in numbers.”

Carving a niche in data centre virtualisation

It cuts costs, reduces carbon footprint and makes the business more agile.

But effective network virtualisation and the benefits that it enables may still be something of a pipe dream for many small to medium sized enterprises.

“There’s a skills gap in the industry that can make it a real challenge for SMEs to get access to the knowledge they need to make virtualisation work best for them.” says Andy Holding, a Network Consultant with Leeds-based SICL.

“The technology has become more affordable and is now available in the lower cost infrastructures rather than simply high end networking as used to be the case. But virtualising your data centre to get maximum benefit requires a specific set of skills because it’s pretty complicated stuff.

It can prove very hard for organisations to buy in those skills unless they’re large and have a direct relationship with Cisco for example.”

The result is that many SMEs are currently missing out on the full benefits that advances in virtualisation can bring - both to their balance sheets but also to their green credentials.

SMEs are a key market for SICL which provides network solutions to private and public sector customers across the UK and internationally.
SICL recruited Andy Holding (an ex-Cisco Systems Data Centre Design Specialist) specifically for his expertise in data centre design and experience of harnessing the advantages of virtualisation.

He has almost ten years experience of working day to day with advanced data centre technologies.

“The result is that we can make virtualisation from layers 2 to 7 available to any of our customers, large or small.” says Andy.

“We can give our customers much better value for money and enable them not only to make large cost reductions but also significantly improve the service offering they provide to their own customers. Legacy design required dedicated firewalls, routers, load-balancers and related equipment for each customer.  Deploying additional virtualised services means no new hardware is required removing the costs associated with providing the extra space, power and cooling.“

“New virtual services can be provisioned with the click of a mouse, without the lead-time required for physical deployments, making the business incredibly agile and providing a significant competitive advantage for our customers.”

The demand for SICL’s data centre design services is growing.

Andy is currently working on a SICL project for a regional utilities business on virtualising their network as well as service providers looking to deliver more agile services and reduce their requirements for space to house servers and associated network equipment.

“We see WAN optimisation as another growth area.  We are working with our customers to achieve the conflicting goals of centralising their services in the data centre, whilst maintaining the application performance they currently achieve with local branch-based services.”

SICL has been in business for 15 years and has built its growth – turnover reached £4.2 million last year – on investing in skills and its people.

“In many ways, the economic climate makes the cost savings that virtualisation brings arguably more important to SMEs than larger businesses that can achieve economies of scale across their all their operations. We work with organisations of all sizes but believe that continued investment in skills and knowledge enables us to provide more value.”

SICL has offered server virtualisation to its customers for several years but is now taking virtualisation throughout the network.

“Network virtualisation has to be the way forward because of all the benefits that it can bring.” says Andy.
“The drive to cut costs and carbon footprint while at the same time increasing the speed with which new network services are provisioned, means we will need to innovate continuously.”

Innovation and people investment drive IT business to thrive through hard times

n a former police station in Wortley, Leeds, eight computer specialists are hard at work. They are the first students to enrol in an in-house language school set up by leading specialist IT business SICL.

By the time the course - delivered by an external tutor - comes to an end, SICL’s staff will be fluent in conversational business French. Next on the curriculum will be Italian and more European languages will follow.

The language lessons are the latest in a series of innovations made by SICL, a leading network solutions and services provider, to equip the business for its continued growth.

In an industry which has been hit hard by a 30% decline in trade since the credit crunch began, SICL is bucking the trend.

“Innovations like the language school and investment in our people are vital to our continued success in this economic climate.” says Managing Director Cliff Fox.

“The economic circumstances have been unprecedented. It’s unheard of for some of the biggest names in the industry to be making redundancies and many, many companies are doing very badly even if they are managing to survive.

For us to be growing at such a fast pace is totally out of step with the trend.”

SICL has more than doubled its turnover from £1.8m four years ago to £4.2m in the year to June 2009. Staff numbers have increased from 18 to 32 and further expansion, especially in Europe, is planned.

Fox says: “Our business strategy and plan was written in 2006 before the recession was even anticipated. We got some early indicators though and were able to sharpen our proposition to meet the new market conditions.”

The collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns in particular gave warning of the tough times ahead.

“We were about to start a technology trial for a project at Bear Stearns when its failures hit the headlines.” recalls Fox.

“We sat down, looked at our technology proposition and asked ourselves what would sell in the current climate. The overall sentiment was that people need IT and the essentials would still need to be purchased but also companies would still invest if the returns were fast.”

SICL provides the full range of network services and solutions, from designing data and voice networks, support and maintenance and deployment of IT solutions from leading computer technology manufacturers.

In the UK it numbers Yorkshire Water, Taylor’s of Harrogate, Yorkshire Air Ambulance, Aedas, Optare and the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Authority among its customer base which ranges from SMEs and public sector bodies through to global corporations.

Overseas, its reputation for technical know-how, customer service and integrity has won the business work in nine European countries in addition to the United States, Middle East and Far East.

“That’s why we decided to set up the language school.” says Fox. “It wasn’t strictly necessary because our customers’ staff are usually expected to speak English. But we thought we’d meet them half way – it’s all part of our commitment to customer service.”

That commitment is paying dividends with 96% of customers rating SICL’s service as excellent in a recent survey.

Running alongside its focus on high quality customer service is SICL’s commitment to the involvement of its staff in developing themselves and the business.

An exemplar case study for Investors in People, SICL has succeeded in developing a company culture that retains and motivates staff whose expertise and experience are highly prized by competitors and multinational IT companies alike.

“What we sell primarily is our skill” says Fox. “Our skill is in our staff and we know that every single employee must feel that they are valued and have a critical role to play in the future of the business.”

The result of this enlightened philosophy is a staff turnover rate of just 6%, which is well below the industry average.

Fox says: “We have a people development and reward policy that is more normally associated with much larger organisations. Our staff are fully involved in preparing our business strategy and it remains the top item on our intranet.

We know how important it is to keep hold of our talented workforce if we are to continue to grow and build on our reputation for excellent service.”

That reputation is and has been a cornerstone of the business’ growth since its launch in Bradford in 1995 by founder and Technical Director Ashley Woodman.

“I joined the business in 2006 having been involved informally for a number of years. I started out as a customer and liked the results we achieved”, says Fox.

“Growth had been organic and based mostly on referrals, which is always great business to get. We’re determined to build on to that for growth but we are concentrating on improving our sales and marketing proposition as well because we know that our brand of service will be attractive to large organisations across the world.

“We have stretching growth targets but they are realistic. We won’t go down the route of growing so fast that we ruin what made the company work so well in the first place. Too many businesses do just that and we won’t make that mistake.” says Fox.

The SME market remains central to SICL’s expansion, especially businesses in the M62 corridor.

“This year our staff have visited more countries than ever before. So whilst we’ll continue to expand our traditional customer base we’ll also look to build our portfolio of larger companies and push geographical boundaries.”

The 90-minute language lessons after work will help with that plan.

“We already have people who speak Hungarian, Russian and French but we wanted to offer something more for our staff.

They are very clever people and they want to keep on learning. That’s a principle that underpins our business and we know it will stand us in good stead over the coming 12 months.” Fox concludes.