On the 30th January, the second in the Goddard Lecture series saw students in Years 11, 12, and 13 have the honour of listening to Yonca Dervisoglu. Yonca is Chief Marketing Officer of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Google.
She’s been there for 13 years and oversees teams in over 30 countries. She co-founded Google Arts and Culture, and she’s behind the initiative which has trained 13 million people in EMEA to date in digital skills and will help 1 million more find a job or grow their business by the end of 2020 – for which Google has received two awards from the European Commission.
Yonca talked about what had allowed her to achieve the success that she has. This included the capacity to work hard, but she drew particular attention to the idea that if you are working in an area you are passionate about this hard work will always feel easier. She then answered some challenging questions with good humour on topics as varied as the necessity for positive discrimination to allow women to achieve greater parity in professional environments, the concern over large technology companies and their access to our data, and the challenges of running a truly multi-national company.
All students who were lucky enough to hear from Yonca left feeling encouraged that if they were prepared to work hard and give things a go there was no reason that they could not achieve great success.
Lucy Carrier-Pilkington (L6SMJ) and Mr Davis (Teacher of History)