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Under the motto, “Let’s target the balance. We can do IT together.”, Konica Minolta supports the NGO “Czechitas”, a project to support entrepreneurship and IT knowledge capacity-building for women in cooperation with the worldwide organisation “Impact Hub”. With the help of Impact Hub and Czechitas, the project aims to attract, select and support women and girls in the IT business with the goal of helping them to access the market, learn the basics, find a job or found a new start-up. The project starts in the Czech Republic in August 2015.
With this sponsorship, Konica Minolta supports the educational workshops taking place at the Impact Hub’s premises in Prague, Brno and Ostrava, Czech Republic, starting in August of this year. The workshop will be showing female pupils, students, professionals, entrepreneurs and career changers a new perspective in the IT environment as well as focusing how IT topics are approached and implemented in a corporate environment. Furthermore, Konica Minolta provides its own IT expertise by way of different company speakers in the workshops.
IT is still a male-dominated domain. A research study found that the percentage of female employees ranges from 15% to 40% in the OECD countries. Even at Konica Minolta, only 10% working as IT professionals are women, which the company deeply regrets. “Finding the right IT specialists will remain the hottest topic for us in the future, since we are facing a shortage of skilled people and the challenge is expected to be increasing even much more in coming few years. Fast evolving technologies, more demanding standards and short time frames for the latest IT developments and renewals require a huge number of IT specialists with a very diverse but also unique set of skills. Because of the fact that Konica Minolta is facing the huge challenge of finding the right people for the right positions, the need to find talented women is also greater than ever”, confirms Ikuo Nakagawa, President of Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe. “Aside from that, Konica Minolta as an IT services provider cannot afford not to promote and foster to its best ability the potential of women in the IT sector.”
Only a well-balanced, also a gender-balanced, team can result in a 100% performance. Different people think about the same things in different ways. The more heterogeneous the group is, the more perspectives of treating a problem there are, which leads to a more comprehensive and dynamic discussion and to decisions of a fundamentally higher quality. A greater diversity in our workforce improves the ways of thinking, acting and innovating by combining different perspectives and approaches. “Women are quite often facing a situation in which they are confronted with an all-male team, in particular in the IT sector. But women should not be intimidated by this. They should follow their personal interests and carry forward their goals. This is what Czechitas wants to foster”, states Dita Přikrylová from Czechitas.
Konica Minolta attaches great importance to a gender-balanced IT world. The company aims to raise the share of woman in its IT divisions and Business Innovation Centres (BIC). With respect to the Czech Republic, the company opened the first Client Briefing Centre of European Business Innovation in Brno for open innovation in March of this year. The Brno Centre incubates, creates next-generation products, invests or acquires solutions that will deliver differentiated value propositions to Konica Minolta and its clients. “We are continuously looking for people who think differently and want to discover the unknown. Our European IT teams and the Business Innovation Center provide jobs from London to Brno”, claims Ikuo Nakagawa.Czechitas Workshops:
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About Czechitas Czechitas is an NGO focused on education for girls and women in IT. It was founded in 2014. Czechitas is offering educational and training workshops and seminars focused on programming, graphic design and Web development. Regularly, after one workshop, 70% of the participants have changed their opinions to positive on finding a career in technology (http://www.czechitas.cz/).
Contact Dita Přikrylová Czechitas Phone: +42 (0)777 348 212 dita@czechitas.cz
About Impact Hub The organisation is active worldwide in 49 countries with 69 Impact Hubs and over 11,000 members. It is an innovation lab, business incubator and community centre all in one. The core idea of the Impact Hub is to offer their members a unique ecosystem of resources, inspiration and collaboration opportunities for growing impact (http://www.impacthub.net/). The Impact Hub in the Czech Republic was founded in Prague in 2010, in Ostrava in 2014 and in Brno in 2015. Its aim is to provide an inspirational workspace, events as well as a vibrant community (http://www.hubpraha.cz/en/). Contact Katka Kropacova Impact Hub Phone: +42 (0)775 1100207 katka.kropacova@impacthub.cz