From an unpaid Coder to General Manager of Fjord, we caught up with Bronwyn to discuss her journey in Digital.

Career

Bronwyn studied at Melbourne University in a Bachelor of Commerce and then decided to live the backpacking lifestyle finding herself in London. A copy of a Digital Magazine sparked an interest that led her to studying after hours. By agreeing to work for free, she landed a role at an internet studio as a coder and she freelanced for The Sunday Times. After 6 weeks, she had herself a job offer. 

The BBC is where Bronwyn’s career really took off as she was given amazing opportunities for training and development and had a lot of time to bring new initiatives and technologies to life. This led to her working her way up to Head of Design & User Experience. She returned to Sydney, having spent 15 years in London, and joined Fjord in 2014 as Service Design Director. After 3 years and two further promotions, Bronwyn is now General Manager.

Balancing Family Life

The UK had great maternity leave options in comparison to Australia. Bronwyn then went back to work part-time. Her life coach once said, “If you had a magic wand, what would your ideal work-life balance be? Now go ask your boss for that.” Following the advice, she did. Bronwyn got full time pay for 4 days work after demonstrating the case that she was doing the same amount of work as her peers in that time. Sydney, however, could offer a much better balance and lifestyle than London could and after having children, this became a priority for her. 

Leadership

Bronwyn is drawn to leaders, both men and women, who are focussed on the people within the business and building the right culture.

Qualities that she admires in a leader:

• Authenticity which she believes allows you to connect more deeply with people
• Self-awareness and being able to regulate your emotions
• Light-heartedness and not taking themselves too seriously
• Passion about what they do.

Generally, Bronwyn has had quite diverse teams. Accenture is aiming to be a split of 50/50 diversity by 2025, whilst Fjord is already tracking quite well against that target. Bronwyn finds it harder to see diversity and balance at leadership levels, which she believes is due to a number of different reasons such as unconscious bias, women choosing different lifestyles and taking time out to be a parent.

Ambition Gap

Bronwyn saw a speaker at a Women in Leadership talk about the “Ambition Gap” and it was something that really resonated with her. As a generalisation, she does feel that females in teams need to be pushed a bit harder, as sometimes they don’t have the same driving ambition, which can be a result of gender conditioning over our whole lives. She feels that as women, we can sometimes hold ourselves back as there are too many compromises.

Advice

• Seek help - work with a coach and mentor and ask for help when you need it.
• Focus on soft-skills - you can be technically strong but the soft-skills will really help to develop your career. Make sure you invest in yourself. Inter-personal skills and emotional intelligence can help to set you apart.
• Don’t specialise too soon - people starting out in their career can come with new skills that people already in the industry don’t have. They can be very valuable to a business.

Throughout Bronwyn’s career she has sought out help and advice, in every aspect of her life, from psychotherapists, life coaches, mentors to even pet coaches for her dogs. Obviously, this has worked! Bronwyn is an extremely humble and inspiring woman and it was amazing to hear about her journey and all she has accomplished.