SWE Regional Development Plan

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has been a champion of women in STEM for over 70 years. Amongst SWE’s 40,000+ members around the globe, was a highly qualified and committed community of members and volunteers in Europe.

Considering the growing importance of the DEI&B (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging) topic for companies together with the challenges of recruiting and developing diverse talent pools in technical sectors, SWE was seeking a means to accelerate its development in Europe.

Having many European countries viewed as world leaders in advancing gender equality (at least in areas such as employment law and maternity leave provisions) was both an advantage and disadvantage for SWE as it required recalibrating parts of the approach which had proven highly successful in North America and India.

As a mature association with a strong HQ staff and robust volunteer leadership pool, SWE already had a well-developed strategic plan and value proposition, with numerous services and structures to support its community.

To provide SWE the necessary insights to create an effective regional plan, Exempla developed and ran a detailed assessment project. The assessment had three main components:

Key attributes of the existing SWE Europe community were the high-profile brands and high-caliber professionals participating, which taken together with SWE’s global scale and reach provides opportunities that other organisations could not match.

Additionally, as SWE’s community incorporates professionals from undergraduate through to senior leaders from a broad sweep of engineering and technology backgrounds, a wide range of networking and engagement opportunities could be created – from informal peer to peer exchanges to more structured mentoring programmes.

Viewing SWE’s strengths in the context of the independent market assessment facilitated the discussion with SWE HQ staff about setting ambitious but realistic objectives.

The outcome of the regional assessment was a clear action plan with focus areas which would leverage SWE’s existing strengths (both at HQ and with regional volunteers) in combination with Exempla resources operating out of Brussels. Phases and success measures were identified so that progress and ROI could be clearly measured and plans adapted depending on performance.

Content development and volunteer engagement were central to the approach which would steadily add new activities without overloading the available resources. Topics for online “Inspiration Sessions” were carefully selected to add region specific content which enhanced the existing global offer. Session formats also included plenty of networking and discussion opportunities at times convenient to European professionals.