Imposter syndrome is a concept (and a feeling) many of us are familiar with. It’s defined as the persistent inability to believe that your professional success is deserved or that you legitimately achieved it as a result of your effort or skill. You’re positive that someone is going to “find you out” and you’ll be unmasked, your job stripped from you in a big show of public humiliation.
3 Ways To Close The Confidence Gap At Work
It has a sibling: the confidence gap. The concept took shape in a 2009 book, Womenomics, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman and it manifests itself in many ways. It tends to adversely affect women, who often cite the magical “luck” as the reason they have advanced at all, or are reluctant to put themselves forward for promotions, believing that they aren’t qualified or won’t get the job. Here are three ways you can narrow the gap – writes Kirstie McDermott, Senior Content Manager, Amply.
1. Ditch the idea of perfect
Perfectionism is often held up as an ideal standard, but can be a glass ceiling that limits us. Here’s an example: A Hewlett Packard internal report found that men will apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, but women hesitate to apply unless they can satisfy 100% of them. Your CV is good enough – apply for the job.
2. Start to speak up
A Women In The Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org found that women are interrupted 50% of the time in meetings. The University of California discovered that in an analysis of a series of recorded conversations, nearly 96% of interruptions took place as a result of men speaking over women. Asserting your right to finish your point or complete your sentence is your starting point. Politely and firmly cut off an interrupter and continue what you were saying – they will get the message.
3. Wait it out
There is evidence that women age out of their lack of confidence, and they reach parity with men’s confidence levels around age 40. If you’re still worried about applying for that job you’re not sure you’re quite right for, don’t be: in a study of more than 6,000 job applications across 118 industries, it was established that candidates who meet at least 50% of the requirements for a job are as likely to get a call to an interview as those who meet 90% of the criteria.
So, if your confidence is suitably bolstered and you’re now in the market for a new job, we have three below that are worth a look. Discover thousands more on our Job Board too.
Data Engineer, Allica Bank
The Role: Data is a key asset to Allica Bank. The Data Engineer will assist and work with finance, operations, credit risk, product and management.
The Responsibilities: You’ll be ambitious and curious and can help Allica understand its data better. You will be an integral part of the data engineering team, building and developing the tooling and pipelines that form our data ingestion and modelling machine for partnerships agreements.
The Requirements: You will need previous experience working as a data engineer in a start-up, and will have a STEM background or similar. Strong SQL and strong Python programming skills (built production-grade tools, have a test-driven approach, consistent and well documented code) are required.
Find out more about the Data Engineer role or check out other opportunities at Allica Bank.
Senior Front End Engineer, Thought Machine
The Role: Thought Machine develops the apps bank customers use to do their day to day banking and also the apps that banking staff use to operate the bank. The Front End Engineer is responsible for the development of web and mobile apps.
The Responsibilities: You will be designing, implementing and developing scalable, performant microservices using best practices and writing automated unit tests and integration tests.
The Requirements: It is essential that you have experience with programming in Javascript. Attention to detail and a passion for writing clean, readable, properly tested code and experience of building large, complex Single Page Applications in a scalable and maintainable way are also required.
Apply for the Front End Engineer job or view more openings at Thought Machine.
Product Designer, Crowdcube
The Role: One of the UK’s leading Fintech companies, Crowdcube is seeking a motivated Product Designer (UX/UI Designer) to help empower businesses to change the world and make investing accessible and rewarding for everyone.
The Responsibilities: Reporting to the head of design, your goal will be to create designs from initial concept all the way through to completion across our website.
The Requirements: Experience in designing complex flows for both web and native apps and detailed knowledge of design software (preferably Figma including working with shared styles and components is required.
Find out more about the Product Designer role or check out more jobs at Crowdcube.
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