FUEL - lighting fires in the right places
L to R: Felicity Davidson, Alex French and Sara Pontopiddan show off their orange FUEL flame pins
Last week the Clandestine Design Group team women deployed early to attend a breakfast in the city, hosted by FUEL a mentoring program for teenage girls.
The breakfast showcased the program, talked about future of the program, their need for corporate support particularly for a work experience program and two Q+A panels.
The Q+A panels where made up of members from the education industry and professional roles and high-school students, made up vastly different panellists at the opposite ends of their careers.
The students were trying to formulate a firm concept of what a university or tertiary course entails and what you do each day in different career paths. The panellists had some strong insights into the ups and downs from their own careers. Including women in senior management who have good strategies to deal with co workers questioning their ability to do their role.
The breakfast was a useful point of reflection for ALL attendees and to either reignite the flame for their chosen career path or getting people to question it - if it doesn’t.
FUEL acknowledges that every girl has a fire in their belly, they help fan that flame.
They challenge how they think, what they strive for, and why they want it, through hands-on workshops, interactive talks and one-on-one mentoring sessions.
Back in August our Senior Designer Sara Potopiddan gave up her Sunday to show the potential future designers the light and ignite their interest in a future career path.
The event gave budding designers a chance to understand more about what the day-to-day working of Industrial Design and aptly named A Designer Life.
The all day event connected the budding designers to women working across Fashion, Digital, Architecture, Product, Film, Interior, Photography, Advertising and Jewellery design.
Sara did a great job representing the CDG team and Industrial Design as a chosen career. She was involved in an intense 90 minute speed networking, round-table session and hosted a workshop to dive into some real-world application of design skills and thinking.
Today it was the teams turn to be inspired by both those in industry and young Generation Z women, attacking their career path in an unrelenting positive outlook even though their careers and jobs path are unknown.
Get involved in the FUEL Program and you might have a similar experience from attending the events as the CDG women did. And you might have the same experience of in the process of helping the next generation that you reignite your own career flame.