As of now, the technology industry is willing to open its gate to everyone regardless of any background. People are having more chances to engage in the tech field than ever. Yet, there are still few voices from the minorities speaking up about their impression of the tech community.

Fortunately, I was able to meet up with Nguyen Thi Dieu Linh and Nguyen Thu Huyen, two successful women working in the IT field. They have shared with me their experience as well as their thoughts about this male-dominated industry. I hope the following answers can provide an insight into a women’s job in IT as well as motivate you on your own journey to become involved in this industry.

1. Can you introduce yourself?

Dieu Linh:

“My name is Nguyen Thi Dieu Linh. I studied International Business (minor Business Management) at RMIT University from 2014 to 2018.”

Thu Huyen:

“Hi, my name is Huyen - IT Staff at World Bank Group. I graduated with a Computer Science Bachelor 15 years ago.”

2. What is your current job? What role do you do in your current job?

Dieu Linh:

“I'm currently working as an IT Analyst Contractor for the World Bank at the Hanoi Office. My main responsibility is to configure, install and troubleshoot issues through the remote control tool and on-desk side. We need to have clear understanding of products such as Office 365, enterprise online meeting tools (WebEx, Teams, Zoom, Cisco); report issues, advances made, and other important update information to end-user; collab with team mates from other sites to troubleshoot and collect advices from each other. It is very important to collaborate with conference/event management companies also, since our organization will have a lot of meetings at the close end of Fiscal Year.

The previous job of mine is quite more interesting, compared to my current one; as a Dynamics CSS CRM Engineer Contractor for Microsoft. We need to provide enterprise-level support to customers; work with commercial clients is synonymous with constant interaction and follow-up in order to guarantee the business flows of clients run smoothly. Moreover, performing functional testing, integration testing, performance and regression testing as needed is very essential as a daily task also, along with diagnose, report, track and assist in resolving quality issues. We weren't involved in fixing the bugs directly, but we would interfere in finding the bugs, testing the app, making sure the business flow runs smoothly between our clients and their customers.”

Thu Huyen:

“My current job is basically to provide IT support service to World Bank Group’s staff. My official role is Senior IT Assistant. The role includes provisioning and supporting all end-user devices and mobility services (PCs, Tablets, smartphones, and other network-accessible devices); delivering all levels of client-facing support and End-user IT training.”

3. How did you decide to study and work in the field of computer/IT? Can you share your journey?

Dieu Linh:

“I've always loved to work with people, in general. And working as an IT Analyst or Dynamics Engineer has helped me to obtain that goal. Unlike other business services, there are some few points that differentiate customer service in IT services, which is the alignment and transparency. There must be a clear alignment from both parties on the goals and the exact nature of the services provided, in order to bring the best service to our clients. Moreover, we don’t exactly know everything in this field, so it is good if you have the ability to collaborate with different teams in different areas in order for us to get the task resolved. Collaboration is the key to achieve success. And lastly, I love this job simply because there’s always surprise surrounding it. This is the field that everything is constantly changing, growing, and updating. We need to make sure we don’t get left behind every single minute and we are always updated to every trend.”

Thu Huyen:

“20 years ago, I chose IT because that field was new to us, and I like new things and challenges. After graduating it was difficult for all of us to get an IT job, especially since no local company wanted to hire a female-IT, they thought that job belonged to male only. I had applied to about 300 companies in almost a year but could not get an interview appointment, I just hopelessly sent out the applications everywhere. Finally I found a job at Software support company, an expat company. They need someone who can speak English in the IT field to deliver support to Indian customers. So the key thing in my career is English, not IT skill. The beauty of the IT field is you have a chance to learn new things everyday. Technology changes every hour so I take the learning part as my privilege not only to satisfy myself, but also to fulfill my job requirements.”

4. What roles/areas do you think are most suitable for women working in Computer Science?

Dieu Linh:

“To be honest, if you have passion in CS then you could do any roles/areas you want. It could be Software Engineer, Network Administrator, or even Data Scientist. There’s a friend of mine who actually quit her career as Math Teacher to pursue her dream being a Data Scientist. You can pretty much do anything you want as long as you want it enough.”

Thu Huyen:

“Nowadays women have much more liberty and fairness to work in all IT fields, you can work in all majors of CS: DevOps, AI, Data Science... These fields are the future of IT in the next 10 years.”

5. What advice would you give to girls who want to work in the field?

Dieu Linh:

“This is actually a man-dominated field, so your opinions and ideas are somewhat not being appreciated as much as you want to. It can feel like you are not contributing enough to this job some time. Therefore you need to give extra effort in everything you do in order to get appreciated. You can feel vulnerable in the beginning of your career, but then you will realize men and women have their own strength to obtain success in this field. And you need to update your knowledge all the time to keep up to your co-workers. Always prepare yourself to get a new certificate in anything (or everything).”

Thu Huyen:

“Women have more power and support than men can acquire, the World is heading to empower females in every role. My advice to our next generation is keep learning, in every way, get ready for your future job, not only in CS major, but also the soft skills like presentation, communication and collaboration are all very important for this role. It is easy to find related course online resources: Udemy, Coursera, Cloud Academy. I can see you are on a very good start in this field, you proactively connect with people and ask for help, just keep doing that and good luck. I believe you will succeed on this.”