Event recap with Women Who Code Vancouver: Five takeaways from TELUS Digital

Diversity & inclusion have been an integral part of our culture. We have a strong and growing community of tech companies and talent across Canada. We continued the momentum and conversations around International Women’s Day through a collaborative event with Women Who Code Vancouver. The presentations were empowering and eye-opening as our team members shared personal stories and relatable experiences with the audience.

Here are five takeaways: 

1. Digital is the intersection of many disciplines

Traditionally, large enterprises have many departments that work in silos, from Marketing, to Human Resources, Legal, Finance, Sales, and more. Samantha, our experience lead, shared with us the evolution of digital experiences and the impact these experience had across traditionally siloed departments. Whether it is an employee tracking tool for the human resources team or a customer sales funnel tracker for the sales team, every department is interlocked with a digital touchpoint.

2. Data is just raw information until you can tell a story

With the growing trend of data-driven decision making, our senior digital analytics & insights consultant, Lawrence, shared three tips to good storytelling:

• Know your audience: Don’t dumb down your message, bring your audience up to have a constructive conversation

• Take a stance: Never walk into a room without an opinion

• Show me the money: Your audience should arrive at the same conclusion 
  before you speak

3. Driving digital consistency starts with reducing our digital footprint

How would you feel if you landed on a website, and your experience was different on each webpage? This is something our team grappled with as our customers were having disjointed user experiences. Anisha Rawat, the About TELUS project manager, shared with us the project journey of building a successful and cohesive end-to-end journey for our customers. This led to the creation of our digital standards, the evolution of a Digital Review Board, and the start of decommissioning web pages that were not active anymore. To build off of this momentum, our software developer of the TELUS Design System, Laura, shared how she helped launch a centralized design system for all of TELUS. 

4. The value of unit testing

Our software developer, tech lead, and Women Who Code Vancouver director Ruxandra, presented on the value of unit tests and the impact on code architecture. She touched on three key things: multiple methods of testing, how to ship quality apps to production, and what a balanced test portfolio should look like. Ruxandra also expanded on the synergy between unit tests and design, and presented some practical examples of unit tests surfacing code smells. 

5. Imposter Syndrome

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong, or that you aren’t competent in your role? If so, you aren’t alone. According to the International Journal of Behavioral Science, about 70% of people will feel imposter syndrome in their lives at some point. Some ways to cope with it is to

•  Identify and recognize when you are experiencing it

• Talk to someone such a coworker, a family member, or friend

• Learn to grow from the experience by finding a mentor or taking classes to improve your skills

This was an awesome opportunity to collaborate with one of our community partners to share what we do here at TELUS Digital with the Vancouver tech community. We encourage all organizations of any size to invest in community initiatives. See you at our next event! 

Do you think you have what it takes to be on #TeamTELUS? Apply today and reference this post in your application. Click here to apply!