“Rome wasn’t built in a day” is a French proverb that originated over 1,000 years ago. Brick by brick, foundations were built, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. As an early-to-mid career professional, I’m still laying my bricks.
Prior to joining the fall 2025 cohort for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Ignite Leadership Program, I had this perception that the height you could reach as a leader was deeply personal and tied to your networking skills, your degree of extroversion, and self-confidence. It felt finite.
SWE’s Ignite Leadership Program includes workshops, independent study, and peer-coaching. These components are intentional. The workshops are interactive, and experienced professionals provide their insights on key leadership competencies, offering practical advice to level-up your skills. They even engage with the cohort to answer your questions
Through independent study, you take a deeper dive into leadership topics and reflect at your own pace to identify your areas of interest and growth. Peer coaching groups create a space to reflect on your learnings and to pool insights from professionals at a similar point in their career. It’s powerful to reflect among a diverse group of ambitious peers just as motivated as you to grow as leaders.
My favorite part of the program? Kicking it all off with a self-assessment through the Leadership Competency Model (LCM). The LCM structures leadership competencies as a matrix with six competency focus areas and four competency levels. This structure helped make leadership feel more scalable and infinite — and really, what engineer doesn’t love a matrix?
Ignite created a space for me to see myself as a leader, and more importantly, to dream bigger. If you’re an early-career engineer looking to grow, reflect, and connect with an inspiring group of peers, I can’t recommend the SWE Ignite Leadership Program enough.
And who knows, maybe you’ll connect with a civil engineer you can nerd out with on ancient Roman engineering as you build your leadership empire brick by brick.
Applications open in July for the next Ignite cohort! Visit the Ignite Leadership Program website for more information.
