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Despite diversity being a much-discussed topic in the tech industry, representation for Black tech workers is still not where it needs to be, with African Americans holding just 7% of positions in the tech industry, and only 2% of tech executive roles, according to data from the Diversity in High Tech report published by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Moreover, Black IT pros — even those in leadership positions — still encounter unique challenges both in the workplace and in their career paths.

While the onus of change rests in large part on employers to alter their approaches to hiring and inclusivity in the workplace, the following 17 professional organizations are dedicated to advancing the careers of Black IT pros and increasing Black representation in the tech industry through training, networking resources, and more.

American Association of Blacks in Energy

The American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE) is dedicated to ensuring African Americans and other minorities have input and a voice in the discussion and development of energy policies, regulations, R&D technologies, and environmental issues. AABE awards $350,000 annually in scholarships to students in energy-related tech fields and offers a career center for job seekers and employers. There’s also the AABE Institute, which provides training, technical assistance, market information, supplier and partnership opportunities, and business solutions. The AABE Institute has a goal of leading resource for energy issues in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora, with a focus on sustainable development.

Black & Brown Founders

Black & Brown Founders is a professional organization for Black and Latinx entrepreneurs to network and learn about startup bootstrapping through online resources and events. The goal is to “give entrepreneurs knowledge, tools, and cutting-edge tactics to launch startups without relying on venture capital.” Black & Brown Founders was developed after its founder Aniyia Williams saw firsthand the barriers people of color face when trying to get venture funding. She wanted to provide a way for founders of color with limited resources to get the training and resources to support their business idea, helping them grow their businesses without outside funding.

Black Code Collective

The Black Code Collective (BCC) was started in 2016 to create a safe space and community for Black software engineers. For many Black technologists, they often find themselves as one of the only Black employees on their team or in the room. And workspaces are often “started and run by white people,” which brings an “unspoken burden for Black people,” according to BCC. This inherent bias that runs through the industry is what makes groups like BCC so important. It gives Black technologists a space to connect with peers who understand their situation, and who can help ease some of the stress that can come from navigating predominantly white workspaces. BCC advocates for taking the necessary steps to retool the IT and tech talent pipelines, and how to take the right steps to ensure Black tech workers have the same opportunity, sponsorship, and equity as their non-BIPOC peers.

Black Data Processing Associates

The Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA) is an international organization founded in 1975 as a network for underrepresented minorities working in the IT and computer science fields. The BDPA organizes technology conferences, local chapter events, continuing education and professional development events, academic scholarships, and mentoring and career opportunities for Black IT professionals. The BPDA also organizes community outreach programs for students, including the Student Information Technology Education and Scholarship (SITES), National High School Computer Competitions (HSCC), and Youth Technology Camp (YTC) to increase representation in tech and create pipelines for future talent.

Black Founders

Black Founders was started in 2011 as an organization dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs and to provide founders with access to advice, mentorship, and funding. The goal is to “stimulate tech entrepreneurship” and create more growth in the community. Black entrepreneurs are underrepresented in the tech industry and only make up 1% of VC-backed tech startup founders. Black Founders wants to increase that representation and bring more opportunity to Black entrepreneurs. They offer different events and conferences for members to connect and network in addition to hosting weekend-long “HBCUHacks” hackathon events at historically Black colleges and universities.

Black Tech Nation (BTN)

Black Tech Nation (BTN) is dedicated to helping Black technologists gain access to valuable resources, networks, and opportunities in the tech industry. It was started in 2017 after its founder, Kelauni Jasmyn, noticed that, after graduating a coding bootcamp, she didn’t see many other software developers who “looked like her in the local tech scene.” She later received a grant to create BTN, to help create a community for other Black technologists who also felt isolated in their careers. The organization offers companies a pipeline to Black tech talent, supports the next generation of Black tech entrepreneurs, highlights impactful Black “techies,” and helps create community hubs in cities for Black technologists to connect, network, and find support.

Blacks in Technology

Black workers in the tech industry typically find they are the only black person in the room, and that underrepresentation bleeds into career growth, pay equity, and mentorship opportunities. Nonprofit organization Blacks in Technology (BIT) aims to “stomp the divide” between Black workers to help “level the playing field through training, education, networking and mentorship with the support of allies, partners and sponsors.”

BIT has chapters across the US and internationally where members can attend events, trainings, and tech summits designed to uplift and connect the Black tech community. Members also get access to career support, networking, and tech resources. Membership is open to any Black woman or man who works in tech, making it the largest community of BIPOC tech workers in the world.

Blacks United in Leading Technology (BUiLT)

Blacks United in Leading Technology (BUiLT) is a nonprofit professional organization that offers community-focused activities, events, and programs that focus on Black technology workers and highlight the importance of diversity, equity, and equality in the tech industry. BUiLT believes in “equity for Blacks in tech, in where they work, with those who buy our products, and investors who support our ventures,” according to the website. You can find BUiLT chapters across the United States, with locations in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Miami, North Texas, San Diego, and more.

Members enjoy free and discounted technical training, including discounted rates for Lean Six Sigma certifications, along with free training for the cybersecurity PenTest+ certification. Members also get access to a large network of other entrepreneurs, founders, senior business leaders, and other professionals dedicated to increasing representation of Black people in technology. Membership also includes professional development courses, mentorship opportunities, events, speaking opportunities, engagement with corporate sponsors, private events, and optional website listings for business owners.

Black Professionals in Tech Network (BPTN)

The Black Professionals in Tech Network (BPTN) was started as a way for Black tech professionals to connect with one another to build community. Its network currently consists of more than 50,000 Black professionals who network, connect, share resources, and grow their careers together. Members get access to mentorship, events, summits, skill-building opportunities, and a strong peer-network to support career growth. One of the goals of BPTN is not only to connect Black tech professionals, but to help corporations strengthen diversity in the talent pipeline. BPTN helps corporate partners understand how to attract, hire, retain, and promote Black tech talent by changing not only the way they hire, but their internal culture.

Black Women Talk Tech

Black Women Talk Tech is an organization dedicated to supporting Black women founders and technologists, with over 2,500 members in its community. The organization is creating a “roadmap to billions” for Black women entrepreneurs in tech who want their ideas heard, seen, and invested in. They hold annual conferences that they tout as the “largest convening of Black women tech entrepreneurs and technologists,” with conferences held all around the globe. Black Women Talk Tech partners with corporate sponsors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and Facebook, just to name a few.

CODE2040

CODE2040 is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “activating, connecting, and mobilizing the largest racial equity community in tech to dismantle the structural barriers that prevent the full participation and leadership of Black and Latinx technologists in the innovation economy.” The organization achieves this through events, training, early-career programs, and knowledge sharing to ensure Black and Latinx technologists have the tools and network to enable racial equity throughout the tech industry. 

DevColor

DevColor bills itself as a “global career accelerator for Black software engineers, technologists, and executives and serves as the go-to accountability partner for the companies who invest in, employ and are led by them.” DevColor is dedicated to creating a community for Black leaders in IT, a group that has been largely excluded from the tech industry by offering career development and networking resources. They offer several unique programs, including the A* program that matches participants with a small cohort of six to eight Black software engineers and managers for a year to offer each other accountability, career mapping, and community. For a spotlight on DevColor, see “DevColor’s cohort approach to uplifting Black IT careers.”

DigitalUndivided (DID)

DigitalUndivided (DID) is an organization focused on fostering more inclusivity in entrepreneurship by empowering Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs. It started as a conference for Black women founders in tech, which led to it growing into a Focus Fellow (FF) program and eventually it turned into an eight-week virtual accelerator program. And they didn’t stop there — DID later took on research projects that uncovered how Black and Latinx female founders receive less than 0.2% of all venture funding. After the report was released, the number of startups led by Black women tripled and funding increased 500%. DID has since continued to expand its offering of programs, initiatives, and research to uplift Black and Latinx female founders in tech.

Information Technology Senior Management Forum (ITSMF)

The Information Technology Senior Management Forum (ITSMF) offers career-advancing programs for Black IT professionals. The ITSMF was formed in 1996 by a group of technology executives who wanted to improve diversity in the technology industry all the way to the executive level. The mission of the ITSMF is to “increase the representation of black professionals at senior levels in technology, to impact organizational innovation and growth.” The ITSMF offers programs for executives, managers, and an “emerge” program specifically designed for increasing the representation of women of color at senior levels in the technology industry. For a spotlight on ITSMF, see “ITSMF: Growing Black IT careers through leadership programs.”

National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME)

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) is a professional organization for underrepresented minorities working in engineering and STEM roles. NACME provides college scholarships for underrepresented minorities who are interested in pursuing a degree in STEM. The goal is to increase representation of BIPOC in tech by providing scholarships, resources, and opportunities for “high-achieving, underrepresented minority college students pursuing careers in engineering and computer science.” NACME’s focus is on helping students become qualified candidates for in-demand tech jobs.

National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE)

The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) is a student-governed organization with 500 chapters and nearly 16,000 active members in the US and abroad. The nonprofit organization comprises collegiate and pre-collegiate students and technical professionals in engineering and technology. The mission of the NSBE is “to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community,” according to the website. 

Opportunity Hub (OHUB)

The Opportunity Hub (OHUB) was founded as a “technology, startup, and venture ecosystem building platform” to ensure that everyone has “equitable access to the future of work” and to create pathways to “multigenerational wealth creation with no reliance on pre-existing multigenerational wealth.” The organization provides skills development, early tech exposure, job placement, entrepreneurship support program, new job creation, and alternative capital formation for college students, young professionals, founders, and investors nationwide. 

Careers, Diversity and Inclusion, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Few would swap sunny San Francisco and the innovation of Silicon Valley for a train ticketing company serving disgruntled UK commuters, but try telling that to Trainline CTO, Milena Nikolic.

A long-time Googler, who’s role as engineering director saw her lead the Google Play developer ecosystem, Nikolic was keen for something new that offered a greater sense of social purpose.

“I had been at Google for so long that I stopped counting,” she says. “It was close to 13 years… and I was itching for a bit of a change.”

In a growing technology market, Nikolic waited for the right opportunity. Nothing clicked until she spoke to Trainline, the international digital rail and coach technology platform, headquartered in London.

“Everything fell in place; every box was ticked,” she says. “I really liked the mission, connecting people to places in greener, more sustainable ways.”

The first 100 days

As the new CTO tasked with setting the technical strategy, ensuring tech team delivery, and aligning product and business strategies, Nikolic had a lot on her plate for the first 100 days.

She spent time understanding the tech stack, the business challenges, and a comprehensive technology team split across infrastructure, product development, security, privacy and technical compliance.

Trainline had sound technical systems and a good level of autonomy, but Nikolic believed the team members themselves felt less empowered to move out of their comfort zone, which impacted business outcomes.

“We had engineers who were very good specialists in their field, but I think people felt less empowered to really own goals and outcomes end-to-end,” she says. “They’re all these brilliant individuals who have a lot to add beyond coding their part of the technical system. They were more stuck to their part of the technical stack, and just contributing to that.”

This reflection pushed Nikolic to make changes to how technology teams worked across the organisation, and support a new target operating model.

Driving business growth through new teams

Trainline has been a tech-enabled business since it launched in 1997, with online ticket sales available as far back as 1999. More recently, under the tutelage of former CTO Mark Holt, Trainline became a story of scale and mobility, moving to DevOps, agile principles and leveraging compute power through Amazon Web Services (AWS).

By 2018, the Trainline platform was hosting more than 80 million customer visits a month, with more than 80% coming through mobile devices. The company sold more than 204 tickets every minute.

Today, its Platform One, with 78 million visits every month across all channels, covers more than 270 rail and coach companies across 45 countries, including over 80% of rail routes in Europe.

Milena Nikolic

Such growth in scale has resulted in a steady ramp-up in resources. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic pushing the business to reach almost £250m in debt in 2021 (the firm has since recovered to achieve net ticket sales of £2.5bn and a net profit of £90m in its latest financial results), Trainline now employs around 400 engineers, data and tech specialists who work on Platform One and process over 600 system releases every week. The company has approximately 800 staff in total across the business.

Since joining a year ago, Nikolic has split teams into horizontal and vertical functions to support operational efficiency and product development.

Horizontal team members own the platforms to ensure their robustness, reliability, latency and scalability so engineers can be productive. Vertical teams, meanwhile, operate across the tech stack so teams aren’t localised to certain operating systems, orchestration or data layers. These cross-functional teams, including product support, UX and data, offer differing levels of expertise across both front and back-end infrastructure.

“Those teams have a clear mission… that they own the product or business outcome,” says Nikolic. “They have full autonomy to decide whatever they want to do… to drive that goal, that mission and move that [business] metric in the way we expect.”

Training engineers and building products

As part of reskilling teams, Nikolic has focused on building a T-shaped skillset and giving staff the opportunity to gain broader experience. For example, she says that an iOS developer could learn eCommerce, or a web developer could study back-end infrastructure.

There have been a number of vehicles to do that, from an internal ‘tech summit’ with speakers from within and outside Trainline presenting on all things tech, product and data, to a ‘culture of craft’ community that offers regular activities, such as coding dojos, workshops, hackathons and meetups. The company also provides access to the tech learning platform O’Reilly, where team members can attend live conferences, and access books and content.

The team has celebrated numerous achievements inside her first year. Nikolic says Trainline now has a robust and scalable platform capable of withstanding 10 times search traffic and transactions, while the company recently launched STicket barcode technology to reduce friction to buy and prevent fraud. It’s also launched delay notifications in France and the UK—a smart move considering a combined 600 train delays every minute, while Trainline’s new Where next? app integrates with Apple MapKit so iOS users can plan their journey without having to leave the app.

Platform One is the solid base for all tech and innovation at Trainline, with microservices and infrastructure-as-code (IaaC) both in vogue.

“Our tech stack is built on a solid foundation provided through AWS,” she says. “By utilising a variety of technologies, such as EC2, ECS, Fargate, Kinesis and RDS, Trainline is able to achieve a hyper-scale infrastructure necessary to enable us to provide our customers with a best-in-class platform.”

Getting more women in engineering

Having worked in the industry for 15 years, Nikolic remains frustrated with a leaky pipeline when it comes to women in engineering. She admits that the tech industry can still feel less inclusive to women, and this ‘societal problem’ can push women to leave the sector mid-career.

“It’s difficult, for sure,” she says, “and, having been part of this fight for 15 years, it can sometimes be disheartening, just how slow the pace of change is.”

Nikolic is, however, hopeful that the industry can improve the representation gap. She points to examples at Trainline, where the firm has introduced diverse recruitment panels and D&I targets, as well as partnerships with coding tech school ADA in Paris and Future Frontiers, a charity equipping students from disadvantaged backgrounds across 200 secondary schools in London and Edinburgh.

She believes the key to improving the numbers of women in engineering is adding more talent at the top of the pipeline, such as encouraging disadvantaged groups from school into early stage careers.

“The only sustainable way for us to prove this is break the barriers for underrepresented groups as they enter the tech world,” she says.

Trainline remains on an upward trajectory. There’s a reported international expansion on the horizon, government contracts to win and a new CDO, hired from Meta, now reporting into Nikolic. “I really want to make sure we execute well,” she says. ”If there’s anything keeping me up at night, it’s making sure the team is set up for success in the best possible way so we capitalise on these opportunities.”

CIO, Digital Transformation, IT Skills, Women in IT