Laura Barlow | Director | Inclusive By Design Consulting

 

Laura is visionary leader and role model who is passionate about building diverse, collaborative and inclusive teams who deliver exceptional quality. With almost 20 years of commercial experience in Technology and driven by developing strong relationships and positive transformation, Laura believes the key to making an impact is putting the business and user at the centre of technology design.

Laura’s career in technology began with a role in Business Analysis, where she found a true passion for working with people and technology. Her career progressed in this field, working across different industries and programmes of work and she grew into leading a business analysis team and evolving the team to introduce business architecture as a capability. Always wanting a new challenge, Laura moved to a role as a Chief of Staff to the CIO, a role which truly shaped the way in which she worked with strategic technology transformation, people leadership and developed her entrepreneurial flair. Laura was a successful participant in the 30% club female leadership cross industry mentoring scheme, where the vision of the scheme was to help create a pipeline for more women into leadership roles.

As Laura moved into a Head of Business analysis and Business Architecture role, she took her experience of Technology and people and developed a high performing team, which she then received a company wide award where she was recognised for her exceptional leadership skills creating a diverse, driven, team and being called out for leading with compassion and supporting work/life balance and mental health.

During her career Laura personally experienced, many challenges to being promoted and receiving pay increases and realised she wasn’t the only woman. Alongside this Laura started to realise there was a trend in the lack of women in technology and the number of women in leadership roles. Alongside her day job, Laura co-founded a Women in Tech network in the corporate consultancy she worked at. The aim of the network was taking a revolutionary approach, to not change women but to embrace their qualities and work to their strengths. The network had a key vision; to engage male leaders in technology and create an understanding as to the challenges women were facing. The network was a success, leading to a step change increase in the number of women employed into the organisation over the next 6 months.

Laura’s continued passion and strong sense of justice led her to found her own consultancy company which focusses on delivering inclusive technology design and inclusive workplace culture transformation. She now consults for corporate client organisations creating impactful change to technology environments resulting in inclusive working environments not just for women but for all intersections of diversity.

Having worked across an array of industries, Laura has demonstrated her dynamic ability to adapt her technology skillset to many different stakeholders and working environments.

One thing Laura always remains consistent and of the utmost importance to her is being her authentic self at work and supporting others, especially women, to do the same.