How does this company support women's career progression?

Thank you for your question! I will answer this to the best of my ability and provide honest accounts of my experiences at IGO to help you with your question. I am overly conscious that with me being a male I am unable to provide all the answers you seek and so with that being said, if you would like any information or opinion from women in my position (geologist) I have no shortage of colleagues that I could confidently recommend you get in contact with or I can pass on your queries.


My personal experience with IGO, since joining almost 6 years ago, has been that everyone's career progression has been treated equally no matter their gender or role. The opportunities for career progression are available to all and the support received to explore these opportunities is real. The backbone of IGO's career progression support is the requirement for every employee to establish a Development Plan with their direct supervisor/manager. This Development Plan is reviewed annually and provides employees with the ability to document the areas in which they wish to develop their career and highlight pathways that would help them achieve their goals. This is then discussed with their supervisor/manager to ensure that the pathways are the best option for their progression and how the goals can be realised and scheduled appropriately. Examples of these development opportunities would be attendance to specific conferences, additional training and certification (IGO supports an internal MBA program as well as supporting external education and qualifications in varying ways), exploring potential secondment options to other teams/departments, focussing workloads on specific areas within your team's deliverables, accessing the internal mentorship program and I am sure I have missed a few others here too! Personally, I have been able to utilise my Development Plan to ensure I gain additional experience across HSEC within the Exploration Department and re-focus my role along a different path to what I originally started with to gain additional experience and skills. I was also lucky enough to be part of the internal IGO Mentorship Program where I was partnered up with one of our senior executive team (a woman) and I learnt a great deal from someone that I already had a great deal of respect for and gained valuable insights that I could apply to both my career and personal life and I will always be grateful for that experience to engage in meaningful one-on-one conversations with someone at that level.


Additional support I have received for my career has been the ability to take paid parental leave when my kids were born. Aside from the unmeasurable benefit of being able to spend so much valuable time with my new (tiny) family members, it allowed me to focus on being a new parent without the worry of my job not being available to me when I return to work and my career stalling or being forced to take a re-direction. Perhaps the biggest and often overlooked benefit to this paid parental leave scheme was that my wife was able to return to her career sooner than what she would have been able to if I had not had the opportunity to take the leave. This speaks to IGO's commitment to ensuring equal opportunities for all as some of the benefits from their opportunities are felt in other areas (communities, industries, families) and not just within the business itself.


IGO is also a sponsor and supporter of Women in Mining + Resources WA (WIMWA) and provide opportunities for employees to attend summits and conferences and have supported IGO employees who are involved with WIMWA (organising events, speaking at events etc.). I have attended several and have found them very rewarding and always encourage others to take up the opportunity if they can.


It is easy to highlight programs, opportunities or events that support career progression for employees and women specifically, but perhaps most important element is the culture that has been established within the company that supports everyone equally. In my personal experience at least, I have experienced this through the opportunity to work within a department (Exploration), which has historically been significantly very male-dominated as an industry, and watch our teams grow in size and diversity whilst being supported to have hard conversations, present team and individual concerns and be encouraged to make changes with how we do things to ensure that our work environments (across corporate, mine site and remote exploration) are accessible, safe and supportive for all. As a father of two small 'women' this is extremely important to me and seeing the conversations being had and the support for changes occurring always makes me proud to be a part of IGO.