Women in Technology: Mallory Monge

May 05, 2022 Scott Evangelist

Written by Laura Best

Mallory Monge, Instructional Designer & Facilitator at Atomic Data, shares her thoughts about the challenges employees face and her perspective on what companies can do to foster more career-building opportunities in the workplace.

Mallory, tell us about your work passion…

I’m passionate about helping employees grow and move up within our company. The key is to create real-world training. To do this, I have to think three steps ahead and attempt to extract every piece of information from our experienced employees’ minds to incorporate into our training programs. This enables us to provide new hires, and anyone desiring quality professional development, a valuable training experience.

At Atomic Data, showing staff we have resources that align with their goals is essential. I would rather everybody have access to an abundance of valuable information than a limited scope. What you choose to do with it is up to you, but ultimately you should have the power to map out your future.

Why do you enjoy training others?

I’m doing what I’m doing because it’s fun, creative, and engaging. I get to interact with everybody in the company, develop relationships across the organization, and learn from people with varying degrees of technical expertise.

I’m a lifelong learner, so it brings me joy to put training in front of people and have them also get excited about it. It’s much better than not training them and simply hoping they figure it out. I get a front-row seat to seeing employees shift from feeling obligated to complete a training to hungering for more advanced learning. And we like to keep it fun! No one likes to sit through a boring training video. Something as simple as making an introduction slide where everyone shares their hobbies, a fun fact, or a bucket list item, brings that human element into the mix.

What is your experience working in IT, often a male-dominated industry?

There have been plenty of times when I’ve looked around the room and realized that I’m the only woman there. It happens more often than not, even if organizations have a focus on hiring women and people of color at the forefront. While that is my reality, I don’t fixate on it. I’ve done a lot of personal work, becoming more intentional about being confident in myself and knowing that my ideas, values, and thoughts are equal, if not sometimes better.

We’re stuck between a rock and hard place with women in the tech industry because we need to get more women involved in IT. We want to promote more equitable hiring practices, but we also have to look at what is stopping women from entering the IT workforce in the first place.

What more should companies and individuals be doing to support women in technology?

On both an organizational and individual level, having flexibility and being able to understand a woman’s needs and role in the community is crucial. Flexibility and trust go hand in hand. Trusting me to leave the office to go and handle what I need to handle, and knowing I’m going to get my work done should be a non-conversation.

Encouraging women to speak their minds is another piece. If the only woman in the room isn’t speaking up, but her body language indicates she has something to share, call her into the conversation. Identifying those cues can help somebody who doesn’t have the confidence to speak up right away.

What can we collectively do to support women?

Individually, I hope to continue to see women gain confidence and pride in their ideas and harness the ability to speak up to share what’s on their minds. On a collective level, we need to acknowledge some of the internal struggles of women and why they exist. Then we can foster more opportunities for women and create avenues to break down gender-related barriers.

Together, we can acknowledge our mistakes and deconstruct our unconscious biases. With the way culture is right now, this is met with a lot of resistance — but you don’t need to be defensive to listen and grow. Let’s share our ideas and discuss them. If one man around the table starts recognizing these biases and speaks up, then other men will see that positive example and follow suit.

In the next 10 years, where do you see your career heading?

I’d like to see the employee development programs that are in my head grow to fruition. I want every employee to arrive at Atomic Data and think, “Yes, I can grow here. I’m really committed to my role, and I want to continue to learn and engage.” My hope is to work with people who have been in IT for a long time and get them more comfortable with sharing information; in other words, getting the “knowledge hoarders” to become excited about the next generation who wishes to be like them.

I hope to provide a path for people to follow wherever they are — to come to Atomic Data and then stick around because they feel supported and see themselves growing in the long term. I’m excited to be a part of it.

At Atomic Data, we have individuals from diverse backgrounds that bring unique perspectives. Because of this, we can include them in our conversations. Barriers are being broken and will continue to be broken as we prioritize growth in every employee.

For more on careers at Atomic Data, visit https://www.atomicdata.com/careers/

Republished with permission from Passion Collective: https://www.passioncollective.co/get-reading/mallory-monge