Breaking Barriers: A Mum, a Career Transitioner, and a Woman in Tech Leadership

Caroline Hildreth is a Transport Principal at Netcompany and a former solicitor, one of a small number of senior tech leaders who arrived via law rather than a computing degree. Her transition happened after coaching from her own line manager while working in-house for a tech organisation, and she's candid about what that shift actually involved: new tools, new terminology, a different working culture, none of it instant.

What makes her account useful isn't the career-change story alone, it's what she reports experiencing once she got there. She describes being "one of the only" women in senior meetings, and a specific pattern of subtle resistance whenever she raises diversity or inclusion issues, often met with a version of "it's the market, it's the same for everyone" that treats a structural problem as an unchangeable fact of life.

She also writes directly about motherhood and leadership, an intersection career articles usually skip past. Balancing sick children and school events against senior deadlines is presented not as a distraction from leadership but as an unplanned crash course in it. Her line, "I'm not less ambitious because I'm a mum," is aimed squarely at the assumption that visible caring responsibilities signal reduced ambition, an assumption she argues actively pushes capable women out of contention for stretch roles.

Her proposed fixes are specific rather than aspirational: sponsorship of women into senior roles with genuinely transparent progression criteria (not just a stated commitment to promote from within), leaders practising active listening without becoming defensive when challenged, and deliberate mentoring that creates space for other women rather than leaving them to find their own way, the way she largely had to.

Her central message to anyone returning to a career or changing into one from outside tech is blunt: "you are not starting from zero." The transferable skills from a previous career, in her case a legal one, don't disappear on day one of a new industry, and the belief that they do is, in her account, the bigger obstacle, not the actual skills gap itself.