Sarah Howells: Changing the face of the telecoms industry

My telco journey began with data entry back in the early 90s at Cabeltel (now Virgin Media) but I was able to work my way up the ladder to Customer Service Director there, before taking a big leap to the other side of the world in 2007 to join Vodafone New Zealand with my husband and three boys in tow.

In 2009 I took a brief hiatus from telco to work in the fitness industry before joining 2degrees mobile as Chief Customer Officer who were the challenger brand in the market at the time. I then headed back home with the family and worked my way through customer experience roles for some big brands in Tesco and Barclays before finding my way back to the UK Telecoms industry and I haven’t looked back since.

In the very early days of my career, it would have been a surprise to see a woman in a senior position for sure. There simply weren’t many women in the industry, unless you’re talking about low level admin roles.

I have of course experienced prejudice in my career being a woman which was more frequent and blatant earlier on. Social functions were typically very male orientated - football matches, darts nights at the pub. I was once asked If I wanted to go shopping with “the wives” whilst the men played golf. 

Fortunately, that was a long time ago, and while there is actively more recognition of diversity and inclusion industry-wide, it goes without saying that the work will never stop to deliver equality. There is a huge shift happening and it’s great to see this being consciously influenced more widely at executive level which is really encouraging.  

At Cuckoo, we bake diversity into everything we do. We obsess about it and for us it’s about having role models of every kind throughout the business. 

Most importantly, we’re not scared of having the conversation. Being unafraid to talk about diversity helps us tackle issues and identify problems that we can then address openly.

From having these conversations, and asking tough questions about our diversity, we’ve been able to implement simple things which can make a big impact.

We’ve made sure that images of people on our job adverts and career pages are filled with diversity, and we ensure we blind review CVs so no unconscious bias slips through in the recruitment process at the initial stage. 

This means that when our recruitment team review a candidate's CV in our inbox it conceals any identifying factors. This includes, name, contact details, age, gender etc when making a decision on who progresses to the next stage of a recruitment process.

We also make sure our screening calls are audio only (as opposed to video calls) to further protect against unconscious bias, as this is the stage at which our recruiters would decide whether or not to put people through to the hiring manager stage.

When we see equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) being delivered and people progressing in their career with us, we shout about it and celebrate those successes. 

We know that the issue is wider than telecoms. Whilst companies like ours can help by having these female role models, and creating opportunities for women within the industry, the battle really starts at grass roots and early education. 

As an industry, we need to be reaching out to young people to show them what can be achieved and the range of careers available to them later in life. That needs to happen before GCSE choices are made.

In the short term, if we’re to attract more women into the industry, we need to shatter the illusion that telecoms is a technical profession. We need to educate on the variety of roles in telecoms and that they are available to anyone regardless of gender. 

We’re always going to need finance teams, customer service agents, product designers, lawyers - there’s no need for women to feel like the sector is impenetrable if you don’t have an IT degree. All the language and nuance of the industry can be taught.

Most importantly, the industry needs to actively be hiring women into not just leadership roles, but also in areas such as installations or aftercare engineers, which are traditionally male dominated.

I went from data-entry to Managing Director for one of the most exciting broadband challengers in the market in Cuckoo and I hope that seeing me in a leading role isn’t just inspiring women to enter the world of telecoms, but is also letting people know that no matter what level you start at in a business, there is a world of opportunity available to everyone.