Photos from the Mentorship Closing Party
We’re delighted to celebrate the end of UX Brighton’s first Mentorship Programme.
Over the past 9 months, we’ve seen tremendous growth and development among our mentorship pairs. We’re proud to have played a role in facilitating these meaningful connections and learning experiences.
Join us in raising a glass to our very first mentees and mentors. Whether you’re a mentee, mentor, or considering joining our next mentorship programme 🥂
Agenda
- Networking
- Micro talks
- Social
Micro talks
Carl and Kate’s Story –
Mentoring can be strangely serendipitous! Carl & Kate will talk about how they met at a pivotal point and how mentoring takes its own path.
Carl Smith, Digital Project Manager, Rittman Mead
Carl Smith is a Digital Project Manager and Agile practitioner. Carl has worked as a Graphic Designer, Tech support, Quality assurance, Business development, Product owner and Scrum master.
He has worked almost exclusively for Fujifilm over last 20 years and produced globally recognisable products for likes of Fujifilm, Canon and Xerox and even won an IF design award for his collaboration with Canon on the Labelstream 4000 printing press. His experience has led to consultancy in digital printing across the world including USA, Europe, Asia and south America.
COVID 19 became a pivotal point for Carl when redundancies forced a career rethink forcing the transfer of skills from server and IoT based Software to Web. An opportunity with Ricardo Energy & Environment to leading 25 person dev team on Agile transformation from Prince II to Agile. Resulting in 3 Agile teams, UX and DevOps team. Whilst at Ricardo and discovering that UX tied together many previous skills over the previous 25 years Design & Systems thinking, Business Analysis, Data Analysis, Ethics, sustainability and Agile.
In 2022 Carl took a leap of faith moving with family from Oxford to Brighton to undergo a lifestyle Change. This move supported by his successful Airbnb business in Hove.
Carl became aware of UX Brighton and Silicon Brighton to conduct research and gain focus of on business requirements of many Brighton based agencies who have strong UX focus, where he took up the Mentee scheme.
Carl recently gained a new position as Senior technical project manager at Agency Rittman Mead based in Central Brighton.
Kate Grant, Senior UX and Content Consultant, cxpartners
Kate Grant, creative content design consultant has 20 years of experience. In content design and editorial management. Kate held senior roles at the Disability Rights, Equalities and Human Rights Commission. They have extensive experience of writing, designing and producing accessible and inclusive information. Across a range of formats and channels. Specialising in converting information for people with different lived experiences, including disabled and neurodiverse audiences. Kate has discovered that adapting their skills into a UX environment as both strategic content designer and UX researcher is an ideal pairing.
Relevant experience NHS - designing an inclusive form-based mental health care and choices document Women’s Aid - developing chat scripts for women who experience domestic abuse PHE Talk to Frank - content design for new website including key content around harm reduction and drug information for young people in line with the new government drug strategy.
My experience being a mentee – Heidi Swigon, Content Director & Co-Founder, Purmön
In her talk, Heidi shares her experiences of being mentored by Kate Grant. Although working in content (UX-adjacent) roles for over a decade, Heidi often found herself as the sole practitioner with her skillset in a team. The UX Brighton Mentorship Programme offered her a chance to connect with another content practitioner. Kate has helped Heidi understand her skills in relation to the wiser industry, showing that mentoring can be beneficial at any stage in your career.
Heidi Swigon is Content Director and Co-Founder of Purmön, a marketing agency specialising in branding and creative strategy. As a practitioner, Heid creates, organises and manages user-centric content, as well as supporting clients with the more operational side of marketing. Over the course of her career, she has written copy for national and global brands, worked on large site migration projects, and defined content strategies for a broad range of businesses.
Are you ready to mentor? – Sharon Webster, Senior UX Consultant, cxpartners
Slides for Are you ready to mentor? (SlideShare)
Sharon Webster is a Senior UX Consultant at cxpartners, where she enjoys the breadth of projects. She particularly loves getting to grips with problems through research. Sharon also has a thing for sorting out content mess, and finds a great information architecture very satisfying. Her first taste of working with UX came when a colleague asked her to take notes during a rather simplistic usability study. Since then she’s developed her research skills, with accessibility and inclusivity at the forefront to make things better for more people.
Sharon will debunk some common myths about what you need, to be a mentor. She’ll draw on her experiences mentoring to talk about how she’s found it, and what she’s gained by being a mentor.
Support
Thank you cxpartners for sponsoring UX Brighton’s first mentorship programme.
We’d also like to thank Silicon Brighton, the community-led initiative supporting digital growth in the South East.
