Just wanted to share that I’ve just got home after a fun and inspiring two-day Sainsbury’s Hackathon! 🚀 We didn’t win this time, but I had a great experience, met some amazing people, learned a lot, and had plenty of fun along the way. Sometimes the connections, learning, and memories are the real win. 😊

What a week, it was really special I feel very lucky, but have also worked bloody hard. Years of plodding away and not compromising on who I am. It was all worth it for this ☺️

Without our fabulous @Sue Black, there would be no WiTPN…..no catch-ups…..none of our lovely friendships, and definitely no conversations that end up changing lives!!! Our awesome Sue has spent years championing women….. opening doors…. lifting people up and building the most incredible community along the way.…..So today, let’s celebrate her. 🥳💃🏼🎉❤️ Happy Birthday Sue! Thank you for creating this amazing network and for everything you do for all of us. We hope you’re having the most fabulous day in NYC and are being spoiled, you deserve the world & soooo much more ❤️🎂✨

I've been looking for my next role for a few weeks now, and it's an interesting time to be looking! Trying to do some of the recommended things to find work, but it's slow, and often feel like I'm posting into a void. The last few months before I finished at my last company were incredibly intense and stressful, it was a chaotic and difficult environment. So it's been good to have some time to recover from all of that. I have loved having time for hour long walks with our dog, catching up with friends and being creative. The job search side has been less fun! I've applied for a few things where I thought I was a good match and have been rejected or don't hear anything. I'm trying to upskill and pivot from a traditional test manager role to modern quality engineering by learning test automation, and increasing my technical skills in api testing/accessibility/performance testing/testing with ai. There's so much I could potentially learn, what skills do you think I should focus on? This week I took the plunge to upgrade claude to cowork and code, to make my job search more efficient and to code an app to create automated tests for. Using cowork to create the app is going well, going step by step, and asking lots of questions. I'm less impressed with cowork for my job search/career pivot project. It was good at asking questions about my cv where details were too light/or my impact wasn't clear. It's not been so good in setting up a daily task to identify roles to apply for or companies to speculatively apply to. Still working through these challenges. Cowork hasn't really saved me any time yet on this, just given me another thing to sort out and test!! I've updated my cv, multiple times over the last few weeks, and have created a version with cowork this week. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the following areas: - I'm in my mid 50's, a couple of years ago I had a career coach who advised that I shouldn't include all my experience or the numbers of years I've been in testing. Since then I've put 20+ years in my personal statement. In one of the chats with claude cowork it told me I should put 26 years as I'd earned it and should own it! Have discussed with my husband and he's not sure I should be so specific. - Should I include my interests? Does anyone pay attention to these. - For leadership areas: should I include something around the challenges of leadership and managing teams?

Is on 29th June at 7.30pm with the amazing Aimee Smith - UK government Chief Data Officer! Aimee is the senior strategic leader responsible for shaping and delivering the UK Government's data vision to drive better policy, services, UK growth and outcomes for citizens and is absolutely fabulous ❤️💃🏽🎉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/aimee-smith-863a6580?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios I really can’t wait to chat to Aimee about her career and her new role. Don’t miss it! 🚀