Following the success of the Cranleigh Network Careers in Media virtual event in Autumn last year, we will be running a similar event but focusing on the women within our community who have forged successful careers in business. Old Cranleighans, parents and other individuals from the wider Cranleigh Network will share their stories, offer some advice to current students and recent OCs and provide some insight into what attributes they feel help bring about success.

There are a growing number of organisations that offer networking opportunities for women working in business, recognising some of the challenges that have been overcome and those that still exist. One of the main benefits of those organisations is the supportive and empathetic nature of the relationships that women can offer each other. We hope that this event will highlight the success that is possible for women in business and tips for achieving that success.

The focus of the event will be mostly on advice for younger OCs and some current Sixth Form students so it might not be relevant for all. However, everyone is welcome to join so please do click the button above to register your interest if you would like to.  

Speakers

An Old Cranleighan, Deborah is an experienced executive search consultant woth over 20 years experience recruiting Board level, C-suite and senior search recruitment for professional service firms nationally and internationally. After an early career within HR working for one of the worlds' leading law firms Deborah, along with two colleagues, founded Totum Partners in 2012. Totum is now a market leading consultancy who specialise in the recruitment of business services roles within professional services firms. Totum has just been shortlisted for the Recruitment Business of the Year. Deborah is an experienced speaker having recently presented on topics such as; "Leaders of the Future" and "Diversity in a post-Covid landscape" and in 2019 she was named in the Timewise Power 50 for her innovative approach to using flexibility to support talent attraction and retention.

Kate is the co-founder of ToucanTech, a community CRM software used by the Old Cranleighan Society to host its online networking portal. Launched 6 years ago by a female management team, the ToucanTech platform is used by over 200 schools and nonprofits in 20 countries around the world. Previously, Kate was a board member of TruRating, a consumer ratings start-up and the co-founder of BusinessBecause, a business school news site, sold to the Graduate Management Admission Council (owner of the GMAT test). She's an active supporter of the start-up community (e.g. an investor advisor for Blance, the UK's first non-toxic laundry chain) and a trustee of an HIV educational charity, MADaboutART. Kate started her career in the Pharmaceuticals sector as a management trainee at GlaxoSmithKline, followed by a stint in capital markets as the head of strategic marketing for equity derivatives at BNP Paribas. She read PPE at Oxford and lives between London and Lisbon with her husband and two sons.

Nikki joined Macquarie in January 2014 in the London office. She received her Masters and undergraduate degree in Petroleum Geosciences from Imperial College London and started in BP Exploration on their graduate programme. She worked in various roles in BP's exploration and production in places as diverse as Sakhalin, Angola, North Africa and Turkey during a 5 year period before moving from the technical sector to the financial sector. Her first role in BP's Integrated Supply and Trading division was as a Product Control Analyst where, for over 2 years, she ran the crude book for BP Rotterdam Refinery and the biodiesel fuels book managing the profit, loss and exposure for the European desk. From there the moved into Crude Oil Operations running physical oil movements throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. She specialised in developing relationships in North African countries, and maintaining them through the Arab Spring over a 4 year period. In 2014 she moved from BP to Macquarie to head up Oil operations in the EMEA region. Subsequent to that she developed into a trading role managing both the physical and financial trading in EMEA, she now focuses solely on the financing business and managing the physical cargo operations for the whole of the cross-commodity business. Alongside her work Nikki loves spending time with her young family walking the dogs or out in the mountains.