Élodie François

Q1: Why do you partner with France’s national jobseeker service Pôle Emploi?

We work with local branches of France’s national jobseeker service Pôle Emploi as they’re vital links in the chain of career changes in France. When we want to offer training sessions, Pôle Emploi identifies women seeking to change careers (either due to a lack of jobs in their own sector or because they realised their previous job wasn’t for them) and it puts these women in touch with us. We also work upstream by presenting little-known IT jobs at forums. Among adults too, stereotyping about IT needs to be stopped. IT is full of different jobs open to a wide variety of candidates.

Q2: What’s the aim of Econocom’s network of women ambassadors?

The main aim is to encourage more gender equality in IT careers. For this, we work in several paths: we encourage adult career changes into our jobs; we raise awareness among girls to inspire vocations in digital technology; and we showcase women with outstanding IT careers in our teams as examples to encourage other women.

Q3: Do you assess the impact of your actions? What’s your vision for the future?

With the health crisis, we haven’t been able to measure our impact immediately. But as regards career changes, we’ve observed that 40% of newly recruited employees who’ve changed career are women (compared to 20% being women in conventional recruitment). This is a real growth driver we’ll be developing and accentuating in 2022. For inspirational stories, more and more women are accepting to give talks about their careers. We’ll also be sharing interviews with men who discuss the importance of gender equality. There are men getting closely involved in our scheme and this is vital. We need shared willingness and socially minded efforts for more gender equality. Lastly, regarding awareness-raising, I’ll only be able to answer your question in ten years. But I hope the girls whose awareness we’re raising today will be tomorrow’s IT directors.