I attended a lunchtime session on the subject of Women in Technology whilst attending Tech Ed Developers.  This was held on the Wednesday Lunchtime and was very interesting and thought and hopefully action provoking session.  I have written a blog post for the Girly Geekdom Blog - Women In Technology - Tech Ed EMEA 2007.  If you are a girl in the Technology industry I invite you to subscribe to the Girly Geekdom Blog and why not attend or get involved with the Girl Geek Dinners?

In the past year I have been involved in a number of conversations with fellow UK Developer Community Members about the subject of Recruiting in IT and primarily the problem of getting the right people in to fill positions in our organisations.  Colin Mackay has proposed a session for the forthcoming DDD6 and this has been voted on to the agenda.  Colin now needs your help with questions for the panel.  The details of the session, have been sent to me by Colin for more details read below.

A panel of experts will answer the audiences questions on the subject of recruitment chaired by Colin Mackay. This session is for you if you are looking for a job and want to find out what companies are looking for. You are trying to hire someone but don't know what to look for. You have been burned in the past and don't want to repeat the experience. You have a question about recruitment no one else seems to have an answer to.

There will be a question box on the day for you to post your questions, but if you want to email in advance, you can email your questions to colin@scottishdevelopers.com. Submissions by email close at 23:59 on the 23rd November.

The panel is:

Sarah Blow: Founder of Girl Geek Dinners and software Engineer at Cardinal Health.  She has grown up around technology and HR with parents in both industry sectors and works closely with Women & Technology and companies to create a better understanding about how women may be recruited in different ways to men.

Barry Dorrans: Senior consultant for Charteris PLC and Microsoft MVP. When interviewing he takes the red pen and becomes intellisense for whiteboards.

Frank Kerrigan: Development team lead for Erinaceous Insurance Services in Glasgow. His team writes enterprise applications for internal customers using C# and SQL Server. Frank has been in devolvement and support of enterprise systems for 15 years.

Karl Lightfoot: Recruitment Consultant that for the last 9 years day in day out has only been recruiting developers in the Midlands region for the largest IT Recruitment consultancy in the UK. He has successfully recruited for large and small corporations through different market states of the supply / demand of talented Developers from Visual Basic 3 to .Net 2005.

Sarah Blow, organiser of the Girl Geek Dinners has a great competition running, but time is running out to enter as the prize is two conference tickets for the Web 2.0 Expo in Germany from the 5th to the 8th November.  This competition is open to Female University Students in the UK.  This is an excellent opportunity and this looks to be an excellent conference with a great line up of speakers including Tim O'Reilly and Kathy Sierra.  For more information and to enter go to the Girly Geekdom Blog - http://girlygeekdom.blogspot.com/2007/10/web-20-student-competition.html