ACEC Women's Leadership Forum

To the ACEC Community,

Join us in Denver on September 22-23 for ACEC’s Women’s Leadership Forum. Targeted toward women ascending to leadership roles, the Forum will offer actionable ways to remove professional roadblocks and pave the way for more diverse and inclusive leadership in the engineering industry.

One such strategy is leveraging volunteerism into career advancement. Not coincidentally, we will host a panel on that very topic during next month’s Forum. Featuring current and past ACEC volunteers at both the state and national levels, these panelists will share stories of how they came to be involved in ACEC and other professional societies, and how those experiences affected the trajectories of their careers.

On day one of the Forum, I will moderate a panel of women leaders of A/E firms. We will touch on their professional journeys and gain their perspectives on where the engineering industry is headed in the coming years. We’ll also hear from the ACEC Research Institute on our Diversity Roadmap, launched last year to help our member firms reach their equity and inclusion goals.

The Forum also will include a workshop on effective communication, which is crucial for managers and leaders. This workshop is an opportunity to sharpen a skill that I believe will become an even greater competitive advantage than it already is. In a world – and an industry – becoming more driven by technology every day, it’s a paradoxical truth that the more technology replaces humans, the more “human” we will need to be.

This Forum is an excellent opportunity to network with your peers in the industry, discuss challenges, and surface solutions. We are at a unique moment in time, when conversations about women as leaders are particularly topical. We’ve made tremendous progress on the road to a future in which there are no “female” leaders – just leaders. But there is still work to be done.

I hope to see you next month in the Mile High City. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Maureen Brown at mbrown@acec.org.

Linda Bauer Darr

President & CEO

American Council of Engineering Companies | ACEC

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