Equipping and Empowering Faculty through Professional Development to Create a Future-Ready Workforce in Emerging Technologies

Rahman, Farzana; Billionniere, Elodie; Gates, Ann Q.; Stukes, Felesia

doi:10.1145/3450329.3476868

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The goal of the conference was to provide a platform to share experiential knowledge and evidence-based findings, and to provide comments and suggestions about how the enrollment, retention, recruitment, and employment opportunities of returning women may be improved through different efforts like research, practice, policy, and evaluation. As a result of the conference, the advisory board and organizing team developed actionable recommendations for actions that industry, academia, non-profit, policymakers and government agencies, can take to strengthen the pipeline for (re-)entering into computing and technology domain [11][12][13][14][15]. In this paper, we present the qualitative and quantitative results on conference attendee's satisfaction level and its effectiveness in identifying appropriate resources to (re-)enter EmTech educational and professional pipeline.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

NSF RESET: A Conference to Support Returning Women’s Transition to Computing and Technology Discipline

Rahman,

Billionniere,

Sulugodu Shashidhara

2022 ASEE St. Lawrence Section Annual Conference Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The disparity of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) discipline have been a persistent problem in the United States of America. Research suggests that women who join STEM discipline leave very frequently to care for their families, financial setbacks, personal obligations, and call to active-duty program. Returning women, very rarely choose to pursue STEM education or cannot enter the STEM workforce because -1) these fields are constantly evolving; 2) the technical preparations can be challenging or unknown; 3) technical skills development require a lot of time and effort; 4) there are not enough transitional programs which can leverage the existing background of returning women to develop new knowledge; and 5) industry and academia do not have enough knowledge to create diverse reentry pathways to prepare returning women for the 21st century workforce environment. Some niches within the STEM field, like Emerging Technology (EmTech) concentrations (e.g., cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing), are expected to grow job opportunities more quickly than others. The demands of these jobs can only be fulfilled by creating opportunities for one of the largest untapped talent pools, which is returning women. Therefore, to understand the barriers and challenges faced by returning women to enter computing and tech education and workforce, a three-day virtual conference, RESET (Re-enter STEM through Emerging Technology), was organized in March 2021. Through our experience in organizing a large-scale national conference, we surveyed 444 attendees (conference organizers and participants) to investigate their level of satisfaction and the overall effectiveness in helping returning women facilitating their transition to computing and technology discipline. In this paper, we present the qualitative and quantitative results on conference attendee's satisfaction level and its effectiveness in identifying appropriate resources to (re-)enter EmTech educational and professional pipeline.

show abstract