What is The Swindon Inclusion and Diversity Network?

Emma Feltham, Head of IT Delivery, National Trust

Emma has worked at National Trust since September 2012 in a variety of senior leadership roles in IT. She is responsible for the end-to-end IT portfolio for public-facing and revenue-generating IT services, delivering projects and programmes and supporting the associated live services. Emma has chaired the Collaboration, Innovation, Technology Forum (CITF) Gender Balance and Diversity Committee since January 2017. She has been involved in the group since 2015. She was shortlisted for the Women in IT Advocate of the Year Award in January 2018 and nominated for the Everywoman in Technology Leader Award  in October 2022.
Emma says, “Diverse teams enable us to be much more effective, bringing different experiences and varied perspectives to everything we do”.

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Claire Farrow, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead,  Reaction Engines

Claire has worked for Reaction Engines since June 2022. Prior to that she was Outsource’s Diversity and Inclusion Client Partner, working with Clients to create an inclusive culture where everyone is welcome, highlighting areas for improvement in attraction and hiring processes in order to widen the candidate pool. Claire started her career with Outsource in 2009 as a recruiter for a number of key accounts. From there, she moved over to programme manage Outsource’s two largest financial services accounts, supporting with contract, executive and permanent hiring strategies. In 2017, Claire set up the Diversity Matters team to highlight the worrying lack of diversity in technology and engineering. She regularly delivers Client hosted events in order to ‘Inspire Inclusion in the Workplace’.
Claire says, “To adopt truly inclusive recruitment practices, it is necessary to support everyone in their career search. The aim of inclusive recruitment shouldn’t be to target one single group, but to ensure that the best talent is presented for every role, by increasing the candidate pool and reaching out to EVERYONE. By this, I mean enabling the underrepresented to have the same opportunities as the next person and recognising when to adapt the hiring process to ensure equity”.

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Nicole Hardiman, Director of Engineering, Flagstone

Nicole has worked for Flagstone since October 2022. Her previous experience includes Technical Lead, IT Practice Manager, IT Engineering Manager and Data Engineering COE Lead at Nationwide, Service Management Lead at National Trust and Global 2nd Line Support Manager for Cloud Solutions within Intergraph. She has evolved a technical career spanning 20+ years to a management one focussed on people as individuals. Her background allows her to speak to the technical teams on their level with a good understanding of their issues. In 2018, Nicole was one of the co-creators of the Nationwide Ada Lovelace Day event, promoting women in IT and encouraging them to consider working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). She was awarded one of the coveted Nationwide Building Society quarterly awards for her efforts. Keen on coaching and mentoring, Nicole believes that anyone with a passion for what they want to do can succeed.
Nicole says, “Businesses need to recognise that their customer base is very diverse and to represent them effectively the workforce needs to be as well. Our differences make us stronger”.