[ Focus: Wired for Success ] Diane Johnson: getting Wired for Success
Diane Johnson, immediate past president of ECA, came up with the initial idea for Wired for Success. ‘Being the first woman president in 109
years, I thought: “I must try and do something for other women”,’ she enthuses. ‘I thought it would be wonderful if we could bring women into the industry and train them to be electricians, so that they can still work when they’ve got children. It hit me more and more that women are being made redundant from the traditional jobs, such as administration. And when you talk to women, if they go to job centres, those traditional roles are all they’re offered. When a man goes to a job centre, he’s offered an array of jobs he can look at. And that’s ridiculous! We are 51 per cent of the population and we’re not utilising our skills. ‘I sit on the Education Training Committee. I
talked to them and talked to other people within ECA, and I said, “We’ve got to do something”. I was aware that for women now, you think how many women live on their own and work nine-to-five and they would love to have an electrician to come to their house, possibly in
the evenings or at weekends. ‘If you’re a woman on your own, to have
another woman come in would be amazing. And then we’ve got an ageing population, as well as religious populations that can’t have a man come into the house – they would all like female electricians they could call on. ‘This is also a trick for companies, not just self-employed women. There is definitely a market for women electricians, even in these dire times. ‘We were really lucky because we’ve got
partners that have come on board with us, like L&Q, and they’ve all really gone above and beyond what we’d hoped. L&Q put flyers out and we had an open day to which a lot of women came along. We’ve got women who thought they were going to die on benefits and they all want to work but didn’t know how they were going to get back to work. ‘You can have someone now who’s 50 and out of work, but with the retirement age moving, they might be working for another 20 years. Some of the women who’ve signed up are highly educated too, they were just struggling to find work that
not only arm the candidates with all of the technical skills necessary to operate as an electrician in the domestic environment, but will develop business skills for those wishing to become self-employed or to set up their own business. The ECA and its partners hope this initiative will serve as
an inspiration and blueprint for success that can be replicated by other forward-thinking organisations and businesses up and down the country. Wired for Success aims to show what can be achieved with a little flexibility, the right partners and the right programme, to get women from all walks of life into a non-traditional career. This model not only lends itself to electrical contracting, but can be adapted to suit a variety of other sectors for the benefit of men and women – offering them the opportunity to gain a valuable skill that will enable them to go out and work, or build a career for themselves.
ECA immediate past president and skills ambassador Diane Johnson (centre) with Wired for Success candidates
would fit around their family. ‘All I’m trying to do – and it’s not just me, a
lot of others have been working on this – is to break down some perceptions and make our industry attractive to women. At the moment, it’s not attractive to women.’
Vicki Van Eck
Vicki is 43 and lives with her partner in Surrey. Her father was an engineer and Vicki found that as a child she was very interested in his work. And by the time she was five, she knew what she wanted to be when she grew up! Despite an aptitude for practical subjects, and declaring her wish to pursue an engineering career, her careers teacher tried to talk her out of it, saying she should pursue hairdressing or secretarial work instead.
Vicki went her own way and did a degree in mechanical engineering at Southampton University, where – as a woman in the 1980s – Vicki says she encountered a lot of prejudice as one of only two women on the course, ‘I got a lot of strange reactions from both sexes when I told people “I’m an engineer” – they didn’t know how to deal with it or how to engage with me. I got the feeling that they thought I was strange – possibly because I was young and blonde!’ After graduating, Vicki worked as a technical support engineer for 15 years, but she was made redundant in 2001.
She was offered work in a wine shop where she was quickly promoted to store manager and then relief manager for south-east England. But she found herself working 90-hour weeks and suffered a nervous breakdown. Vicki has now recovered and is ready to learn a new skill and embark on a career
again. She sees the ECA Wired for Success Initiative as an important stepping-stone back into work, and looks forward to gaining a new set of skills while working with the talent she already has. ‘At university in the 80s, people looked at me strangely because I wanted to do a
The candidates will be trained for domestic installations
man’s job. They never considered it was because I was actually interested in the subject itself. I want to give other women confidence; they shouldn’t be frightened, or scared, or ashamed because you want to do a different sort of job.’
November 2011 ECA Today 41
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72