Women Of The Channel: Verizon's Schijns Tells Attendees To 'Work On The Digital You'

Everything is going digital, and that creates more demand for the kind of talents and traits that women bring to the channel workplace, said Janet Schijns, chief marketing technologist and vice president at Verizon.

The problem for technology and the channel, she said in a keynote at The Channel Company's Women of the Channel event in New York City, is that women are actively exiting the market and few are looking to return. Schijns said studies have found that by 2020 there will be 2.6 million jobs in technology without someone to fill them. At the same time, she said 1.5 million women are dropping out of the field.

A separate study dug into the reasons for women departing the field, Schijns said, finding that 90 percent of them felt that they didn’t belong and 80 percent said they felt there were barriers in getting to the top. Of the women who left, Schijns said the study found that only 3 percent of them said they planned to return to a technology company position in the future.

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That dropout rate is especially a problem as the age of the digital world takes over, Schijns said. Especially important in this digital age is customer service, Schijns said, with 56 percent of best-in-class companies gaining market share because of their good customer service.

’This digital transformation, everything digital has now become about one thing and one thing only: delivering a better customer experience,’ Schijns said. ’We [as women] have a definitive advantage.’ That is because women make up upward of 60 percent of the customer base and have a generally better understanding of the customer experience, she said.

For women, that means there is an opportunity in technology that they can’t afford to miss, Schijns said.

’Digital is truly creating a real opportunity for women,’ Schijns said.

To take advantage, Schijns urged the women in the room to ’work on the digital you’ by developing the skills and positioning themselves to make the most of the new digital world. To do that, she said women will have to embrace the digital world, prepare themselves for the unknown, and work to stay relevant.

She also urged them to share their experiences with the younger generation by having an honest conversation about what they would have wanted to know when they were entering the workplace for the first time.

PUBLISHED DEC. 4, 2015