2026 Agenda

Women in engineering develop strong technical foundations, but the relationships that determine whether that capability translates into advancement are rarely taught and almost never formalised well. The engineers who move furthest are not always the most technically accomplished. They are the ones who built the right relationships at the right time, and understood the difference between a mentor, a sponsor and a supporter before it mattered.

This one-day masterclass provides practical, skills-based training in building and managing mentoring and sponsorship relationships, tailored to the specific dynamics and career challenges of engineering environments.

Learning outcomes:

• Examining the critical distinction between mentorship, sponsorship and general support to understand which type of relationship you need at each stage of your career and why conflating them costs you time and opportunity
• Analysing your current professional relationships to identify where you have genuine mentors and sponsors, where you may have mistaken supporters for one or the other, and where the gaps are that are most limiting your advancement
• Building mentoring relationships organically through problem-solving conversations and genuine rapport to create the trust that formal mentoring arrangements rarely replicate
• Understanding how sponsorship is generated rather than requested to develop the visibility, track record and relationships that make advocacy a natural outcome rather than an awkward transaction

Leaving with a personal relationship development plan identifying your highest-leverage connections to build or deepen and the specific actions that will move each relationship forward 

In engineering, precision matters and so does how you manage your time, energy, and decisions. Yet too often, talented engineers are overwhelmed by complexity, unclear priorities, and overcommitment. The solution? Learning to think like a project leader, strategically, decisively, and efficiently.

This masterclass is designed for women in engineering who want to build real project leadership capabilities while embracing a “work smarter, not harder” mindset. You will gain practical insights and proven strategies that help you lead technical projects with confidence, influence stakeholders with clarity, and deliver outcomes without burnout.

More than just a project management lesson, this is a career-enabling experience designed to elevate how you work and live while learning project management basis.

What you will master:

Strategic planning without the overload

• Learn projects planning with a lean and outcome-driven approach

• Learn prioritisation techniques

• Smart communication that keeps projects moving forward

• Design communication techniques that reduce noise and rework

• Learning how to tailor messages based on the audience: techniques in assessing the culture and audiences

Teams & stakeholders dynamic

• Build techniques to collaborate across disciplines, manage expectations, and resolve conflicts constructively

• Lead without authority using trust, clarity, and structured delegation

• Risk-Based Thinking for Better Decisions

• Apply qualitative and quantitative risk assessment to prioritise actions smartly

• Learn the art of knowing when to act - and when not to

Performance Management Without Micromanagement

• Define relevant, realistic KPIs and progress measures that drive decisions, not just reporting

• Implement lightweight tracking systems for early intervention and better results

Quality Without Perfectionism

• Ensure deliverables meet standards without overengineering or burnout

• Learn when “fit-for-purpose” is enough and how to explain that to stakeholders

• Reflective Practice for Continuous Growth

• Learn smart techniques for project reviews and personal growth

• Use project thinking to elevate your career decisions and life planning

Three main takeaways:

• Learn a smarter approach to leading engineering projects

• Build confidence in planning, prioritising, and influencing

• Take away practical tools for both work and life

• What is the difference between an external barrier and a decision you have agency over, and how do you know which one you are facing?
• Why does strong performance so often fail to translate into advancement, and what does it take to be visible to the people who make promotion decisions?
• What specifically changed the outcome for you at the point where your career could have gone either way?
• What would you tell a high-performing engineer in this room who has been doing everything right and still isn't moving?

• Mapping what progressive organisations implement once flexible working and parental leave are in place to move beyond the baseline
• Examining how tracking gender data by level and role type reveals where the pipeline is leaking inside your own organisation
• Challenging the difference between policies that retain women and programs that advance them to hold your organisation to a measurable standard

• What does career drift into a support function look like in practice, and how do you know when it is happening to you?
• How do you make the case for staying in a technical role when organisational pressure is pushing you toward a support function?
• At what point does moving into a support function become a deliberate choice rather than something that simply happened?
• What can leaders do to ensure the technical track remains genuinely available to the women in their teams?

• What does visibility mean in an engineering context, and how is it different from self-promotion?
• How do you get allocated to work that builds your profile when decisions are made by people who don't yet know your capability?
• What separates a manager who supports your development from a sponsor who actively opens doors?
• When the project that would prove your readiness goes to someone else, what do you do next?

• Recognising how credibility is still measured against a historically male template to identify where a different standard is being applied to you
• Developing a communication approach that reads as authoritative without requiring you to abandon the qualities that make you effective
• Preparing the case for your own advancement using the evidence you already have to stop waiting for recognition the system wasn't designed to give automatically

• Distinguishing between the formal networks your organisation provides and the informal ones where advancement decisions are made
• Building network capital deliberately from your current position to create relationships that open doors without requiring decades of shared history
• Leveraging the networks you already have to accelerate access to the rooms and relationships that matter most to your next step

• If you could go back to the moment your career diverged from the path you expected, what would you do differently and why?
• What advice did you receive early in your career that turned out to be wrong, and what did you learn from following it?
• What did it take to back yourself in a room that wasn't designed to make that easy?

• Examining how credibility is built differently across engineering disciplines and seniority levels to identify the specific currency that carries weight in your context
• Applying the distinction between performing authority and building genuine influence to stop investing energy in the wrong signals
• Positioning your technical expertise, and professional relationships as a coherent package to make the case for advancement on your own terms rather than someone else's

• What would a program that genuinely changes engineering culture need to look like, and who would have to be in it?
• What would it take to get more male leaders into a room like this one, and whose responsibility is it?
• How do you take the conversation back into an organisation where the people with the power to change things weren't present?
• What does meaningful male allyship look like in an engineering workplace, and how is it different from support in principle?

• Distinguishing between allyship as a stated value and allyship as a daily practice to identify where the gap exists in your workplace
• Examining how the most effective male allies in engineering are using their positional power to change who gets the work, the visibility and the advancement opportunities
• Applying a practical allyship framework inside your own team to move from good intentions to measurable impact

• Make meaning out of data & converting data into knowledge
• Working effectively with data even if you're not a data scientist
• Practical tools for engineers: dashboards, Python, simulation, Excel on steroids
• Using data to validate design decisions, improve performance, and innovate

• Distinguishing between authenticity as a personal value and authenticity as a deliberate professional choice to understand why the latter is becoming a competitive advantage
• Examining how the rise of AI-generated content is making genuine human voice and direct personal experience more valuable, not less
• Applying an authentic communication style across client, stakeholder and leadership contexts to build trust that polished performance rarely achieves

• Recognising how external political pressure on DEI filters into organisational behaviour to identify where rollback is happening before it becomes structural
• Maintaining progress on gender equity when the broader conversation has stalled to protect gains that took years to build
• Converting internal data and lived experience into a business case that holds up when political cover for this work has been removed

• Identifying the risk signals that move project outcomes to stop investing time in the ones that won't work
• Understanding how to communicate risk to stakeholders in a way that produces decisions to keep projects moving when the pressure is highest
• Applying a risk management framework that holds up under real conditions not just in a controlled environment.

• Examining how AI is reshaping the day-to-day work of engineers across disciplines to identify where you need to upgrade your current skills
• Understanding how to use AI to enhance your engineering judgment to stay on the right side of the professional liability questions
• Applying a practical framework for evaluating which AI tools are worth adopting in your role to make better decisions on where to put your attention

• Examining how climate and system risks are being incorporated into transmission planning and network development decisions, and what this means for engineers
• The practical constraints in delivering large-scale renewable generation, storage and transmission projects
• How evolving system conditions are reshaping traditional engineering and planning assumptions