WomenTech Educators Contract Training

By the end of the training, your school teams will have created a fully-developed Recruitment and Retention Plan. Teams will then receive plan feedback and support for implementation. Templates and best practice examples from other schools will help shorten the timeline from intention to action, so that you can move the needle on women in STEM/CTE in one year or less.

Contract training can also be customized to grant proposals, high school level, and one career pathway such as automotive or cybersecurity. Additional options include the facilitation and write up of your school’s plan, development of your school’s female-focused outreach platform, and a Feedback Loop that includes a female student survey and a WomenTech Plan Revision Workshop one year later.

"We recruited 9 new women to Welding in only 4 weeks after participating in a WomenTech Educators Training. Before the training, if we had 3 women in Welding it was like hitting a homerun. I tried some things like offering a Welding art class, but the women that came were not interested in our program. It was very frustrating; I realize now I didn’t have a plan.

It was the decisive work plan we developed as a team with Donna’s facilitation during the training that I believe made the biggest difference. Our plan included recruitment strategies that I would never have thought of myself. These strategies worked because they were so specific. The training made us look at everything differently.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, you might as well go with something that has already worked for other schools—I believe that made the biggest difference for us. Otherwise, we could have gotten ten people together and sat in a room, but I am not sure we would have come out with the same outcomes or the same strategies that we did.”

~ Sue Silverstein, Welding Instructor, School of Technical & Applied Sciences, Milwaukee Area Technical College, Oak Creek, WI brought a team to a 2018 WomenTech Educators Online Bootcamp

Bring the WomenTech Bootcamp Training and Coaching to your location. This is the original version of the Bootcamp that the majority of our training participants have gone through and that helped them see successful outcomes in a year or less. This version of the Bootcamp is described in detail here. Download the factsheet/curriculum about the training and number of hours required here. Online Recruitment strategies are the focus during the Pandemic, IWITTS has been teaching Online Recruitment to schools since 2010.

Broward College participated in this version of the training and increased female enrollment in CS/IT by 77 in a year, and increased male enrollment by 258 students, read their case study here.

Up to 4 teams of 6 - 10 team members can participate for a total of 40 participants.

Up to 4 Career Pathways (one per team).

"The WomenTech Educators Training got us thinking intentionally about who we were going to target for outreach, how we were going to target them, and how we would follow up to make sure we had actual results linked to the different programs and events that we were holding.

In a year’s time, we had increased female enrollment in our IT & CS Department from 149 to 226 female students and male enrollment had also increased from 751 to 1009 male students. Since then, it has grown organically and blossomed into something that our college just does naturally.

I think getting together as a team with intention—because we're all so busy—and developing a written plan that we could stick to was what made all the difference. It made us really think outside the box and get more creative about the ways we could reach different demographics and teach our courses. I don’t think we would have ever done that if it wasn't for the WomenTech Educators Training."

~ Michelle Levine, Interim District Director of Faculty Development, Broward College, FL participated with team in 2015 WomenTech Educators Online Bootcamp

We can provide customized training and an entire female-focused Outreach Platform, so your school can focus on teaching and student outreach. During the last few years, Donna Milgram has customized WomenTech Trainings to fit one career pathway, to target grant goals and deliverables on a set timeline, and even developed a program's entire Outreach Platform.

One example of this was for a Automotive Pre-Apprenticeship Program that went from 0 female students to 7 in just 2.5 months -- 100% were underrepresented minorities and were retained. (Only 1% of automotive technicians are female). All students had to be hired by the City of San Francisco to qualify for the Pre-Apprenticeship: making it through an extensive application, testing, a group interview and a background check. Read this case study here to see how they did it and IWITTS's role.

"There was a big difference in how we recruited for our 1st cohort of Pre-Apprentices—which had no women—and our 2nd cohort that had 7. We thought it would be a lot easier than it turned out to be. The first time we partnered with community-based organizations to help us with recruitment, but after the WomenTech Training I realized we weren't welcoming to women.

The WomenTech Training gave us a robust Version 2.0 Outreach Strategy. We had an entire platform and the messaging including: a Women and Automotive website, flyers featuring female role models, and a fact sheet with talking points about why automotive and apprenticeship is a good field for women. Plus, we had 3 Women in Automotive Meet & Greets with female automotive technicians.

The knowledgebase that IWITTS provided us on how to build an outreach strategy that targeted women helped us to tap existing resources within the college and led to our great results—from 0 to 7 women in the Automotive Pre-Apprenticeship program in 2.5 months.”

~ Monique Forster Pascual, Director of Apprenticeship & Instructional Service Agreements, Workforce Development, CCSF, CA hosted a 2018 WomenTech Educators Onsite Training: Customized to Automotive, Apprenticeship, Grant Goals and Timeline

In just a few months, the school met their goal of enrolling 50% female students (12 females, 12 males) in the Makerspace course and greatly increased female participation in the Makerspace club from all male to 40% female. (Nationally, only 20% of Makerspace students are female).

A 20-page annotated Bibliography on Women and Makerspace that we developed provided the basis for the strategies and customization of the Recruitment and Retention Plans. All of IWITTS's strategies are research based. Read this case study here to see how they did it and IWITTS's role.

"The WomenTech Makerspace Training brought our team together and was expertly facilitated. It led us through the process of capturing our busy faculty's ideas, and collected them in a very effective way. Now we have an action plan for a short timeframe, so we can be ready for students the next semester.

I don’t think we could have gotten to this point without Donna's facilitation. I knew from my past experience with IWITTS that Donna could help us create a plan that would produce results. The materials, the research-based strategies, the PowerPoint slides, and the sample Student Leads Sheets were all so valuable and engaged faculty in the process.

The WomenTech Makerspace Training enabled CCSF to achieve our grant's goals to make our MakerSPHERE inclusive to ALL students from day one.

It's very challenging work to change a culture and do these kinds of projects, and anytime I feel lost at sea I fall back on the plan.”

~ Maura Devlin-Clancy, MakerSPHERE Coordinator, Faculty, CNIT Department - Web Development Programs, City College of San Francisco, CA brought a team to a 2018 WomenTech Makerspace Onsite Training. CCSF achieved 50% female participation in the new Makerspace 101 course, 2 semesters in a row.

It's critical to evaluate what is working to recruit female students and what isn't working as you implement your plans. Keep track of what works and then take time to revise the Recruitment and Retention Plans for WomenTech Year 2 to reflect this. Schools often skip this important step and expend equal energy on all the strategies instead of only repeating the most effective ones.

We are a big proponent of working smarter not harder. To that end we have a survey of female students that we will customize to your school that will help you identify what is working. The results of the female survey and the "after" results in the WomenTech Data Dashboard are presented in a one-day Plan Revision Workshop during which the school teams share their qualitative outcomes and revise the Recruitment and Retention Plans for Year 2. This feedback loop was a key element of our award-winning CalWomenTech Project funded by the National Science Foundation.

By populating a customized WomenTech Data Dashboard before the training in December 2019, IWITTS helped NVRHS drill down to discover that only 9 female students were currently eligible to enroll in the course. Once NVRHS had this data, their WomenTech team was able create a plan that resulted in 100% of the eligible female students enrolling in only 30 days. The female students made up 9 of the 29 students enrolled and all of them were retained and plan to take the certification test.

I think the team was the biggest difference. We were able to get all kinds of perspectives. I think it worked much better because we had buy-in from the instructors and the staff—if you're working on it and you're part of it, you own it. Our team owned the Recruitment and Retention Plans. We were able to hear what strategies had been tried in the past that didn’t work, so we could leave those out of our plan."

~ Nancy Wilson, Assistant Dean, Career Technical Education, Lawson State Community College, Bessemer, AL brought a team to a 2017 WomenTech Educators Online Training

"The WomenTech Educators Training was very eye-opening and it provided a vehicle and framework to focus our efforts. It gets you to think about what it takes to be successful. The most valuable aspect of the training was building our team!

Getting a group of people focused and thinking about retention was a good thing. Getting the institutional buy-in is critical. While top-level management needs to know what's going on, it's the faculty—the people actually doing the work—that you need to get on board.

When our team first participated in the WomenTech Educators Training, we were focused on the BioTech Manufacturing program, but we built that up and we've now translated the training to our other Manufacturing programs with a similar approach.

Everybody knows that you can't maintain 100% retention, but that was the case from that second cohort to the next. As your program builds, there's inevitably going to be some attrition, but we have kept a very high retention rate."

~ Dr. John Henshaw, Dean of Workforce Development at Mount Wachusett Community College and Project Director for Massachusetts Advanced Manufacturing TechHire Collaborative brought a team to a 2015 WomenTech Educators Online Training. Female enrollment went from only 1 female student to 9 out of 13 the next semester. Retention of both female and male students went from 50% to 100%.

Donna Milgram has been the Principal Investigator of 5 National Science Foundation grants. She has worked intensively with schools—boots on the ground—to develop the strategies and system that help educators enroll up to 25-50% female students in STEM/CTE classes.

Donna's NSF-funded CalWomenTech Project was highlighted by the National Science Foundation for demonstrating significant achievement and program effectiveness and chosen as 1 of 3 model projects by the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

After over 30 years of service in the field, she has "cracked the code" and developed an 8 point system for recruitment and a 12 point system for retention that provides numerical results in about one year—not just the hope of eventual change 5-10 years down the road that nobody can measure.

She has developed recruitment and retention plan templates based on her proven system that requires you to use the plan elements which have resulted in success for so many of our past WomenTech Educators Training participants. She has even created templated personal encouragement and welcoming conversation guides.

Donna knows busy educators don't have time to figure this out all by themselves. That's why she developed rich supplementary online resources that range from examples of women in STEM/CTE recruitment videos, to a tested NSF-based spatial reasoning curricula that improves retention.

She loves being able to make such a big impact on STEM/CTE classrooms around the country, and in turn on the lives of women and girls who have the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Donna is committed to finding as many ways as possible to get our proven system out to the world. This Bootcamp version of the WomenTech Educators Training is an online version of IWITTS's Live Event for those who want to immerse themselves in the knowledgebase and walk away with a recruitment and retention plan that they have customized to their school. Just like in the Live Event, you'll have the opportunity to ask her questions and to volunteer to receive feedback on a section of your plan in front of your fellow Online Bootcamp "recruits!"

WomenTech Educators Contract Training for Your School

Educate & Empower Your School to Recruit & Retain Women in STEM/CTE

Watch Video Produced by Past Client to See Program in Action

WomenTech Educators Online Bootcamp for Your School or State

Core Training & Coaching System

WomenTech Educators Add-On Contract Training Options

Talk with Donna About WomenTech Contract Training for Your School

Online Training Proven Outcomes with Case Studies