This past year Ancestry employees launched an internal group, Ancestry Women in Technology (AWIT), which aims to promote our diverse culture where anybody can develop and thrive in a motivating and supportive environment. The AWIT group is focused on women but anyone is welcome to join us as we work to empower our employees. We provide tools, training and a community to help them reach career goals and drive their own success. With events such as our brown bag sessions, community outreach, quarterly speaker series and semi-annual service projects, we’re working to create a global network for the Ancestry workforce.
At the start of this new year we’d like to highlight some of our favorite activities and gatherings from 2015. We look forward to another great year of professional development and service.
Community Outreach
AWIT put on several fantastic sessions at this year’s SheTech event. The purpose of this event is to gather high school level girls from all over the state to get them interested in STEM. We put on highly engaging sessions showing them several different career paths they can take within the world of STEM.
Speaker Session
We invited board member Janice Chaffin to speak on Career development. AWIT opened up the session to all Ancestry employees so we could learn more about how to find success in our individual career paths. Chaffin encouraged employees to stand up for their own careers and take control of our own work-life balance. She also cautioned us to avoid getting pulled into positions that aren’t the right fit, explaining that we should make intentional decisions about our career paths.
Service Project
AWIT hosted the Days for Girls program right here in our Provo office and our turnout was astounding! Days for Girls helps support girls all over the world in their educational pursuits. We finished a total of 70 kits and helped get 300 more on their way.
