This Month, Get Empowered
By Somdutta Sarkar
February. The small month of big things. The month of LGBT History, of St. Valentine’s, and of #Empower.
Perchance the blue and white flyers, posters, and stickers popping up around the university area recently have escaped your notice, so here’s what you need to know about the event that everyone’s talking about.
The Leeds Women in Leadership Society is putting together the power-packed Empower Conference full of leadership and skill-developing workshops, six speaker sessions, and an entrepreneurial panel for students and business leaders to come together to network and share learnings on an equal platform. To be held at Riley Smith Theatre and a handful of other venues at the LUU on 9th February, the Conference is a golden opportunity for Leeds students to earn some brownie points for their CV.
Leeds WILS is a multiple award-winning student-led society that ‘seeks to empower students to reach their full potential irrespective of gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or any other factor’. The importance of inclusion in the workplace and beyond is a focus area for the society, and the Empower Conference is a natural extension and embodiment of their core philosophy; which is to not only promote leadership among women, but to recognize the key importance of empowering everybody to be the best they can. The society was a finalist at the National Undergraduate Employability Awards 2018 recently, and is currently in the running for The Tab Diversity Awards.
The Conference aims to inspire, empower, and practically enable participants to pursue leadership in whichever direction they choose. It is open, and indeed appealing, to students of all genders and disciplines. With high-profile names like Manuel Heichlinger, LinkedIn’s Head of Recruitment, Libby Denchfield, Head of Conduct at Standard Chartered, and Vodafone’s Legal Director Kerry Phillip on the panel, #Empower seems ready to up the ante on student events.
It is certainly going to be a busy day for attendees, who are spoilt for choice between five workshops – at least one of which is fully booked, last we heard – that explore professional and employability skills ranging from ‘communicating with impact’ and ‘body language for the boardroom’ to the importance of selfcare for career and practical insights on how to succeed at interviews. These seem particularly relevant considering that most of the companies associated with the event, such as sponsors KPMG and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, are potential employers for graduates.
With a networking lunch hour and the opportunity to win raffle prizes worth hundreds of pounds thrown in, this is one event that is going to be hard to miss. Tickets to #Empower are available while they last, as is a trove of opportunities to kickstart the conversation around equality, diversity and inclusion.
Find out more on the facebook event here!