By Mary Schofield, Director, Marketing

Recently, I had the opportunity to have a virtual, overseas, chat with Sheila O’Sullivan who works in Ireland with Fidelity Digital Assets, a business within Fidelity Investments. While her official title is Senior Manager, Technology Management, she explains it further in that she specifically works on the Product Development Engineering team. Her career journey began in 2005 after she graduated with honors and a Computer Science & Information Systems degree from University of Limerick in Ireland. Today, she is busy raising her two young children with her husband, working remote and trying to balance the mayhem of her worlds colliding under one roof during a pandemic.

Q: What has life been like for you during the pandemic, and how has Fidelity supported you?

Sheila: Fidelity has been brilliant all the way through – I think first off, Fidelity was so quick to move to remote working, I truly felt that our safety was their top priority. Secondly, I think the flexibility around our working hours was so important – minding two kids is a job in itself, so I was very grateful to my manager, who was very understanding of the fact that I was in a sense balancing two jobs. He was watching for outcomes, not the clock – so this gave me the ability to still deliver on my work commitments during the kid free hours.

Q: What’s something about working at Fidelity that surprised you?

Sheila: When I first joined Fidelity Digital Assets, I was really surprised by the startup mentality within the Business Unit – it was an amazing find, especially within one of the world’s largest financial services providers.  This mentality allows us to be nimble in response to our rapidly growing business, and it also breeds a culture of innovation and discovery.

Q: Tell us about your team – what do you love most about working with them?

Sheila: Our team is responsible for building modern user interfaces and driving superior customer experiences. Our team partners with Product and UX Design teams to build the best user interfaces for our applications and web presence. The thing I love the most about our team is their energy and their enthusiasm to deliver on our key Business and Tech initiatives. Over half of our team joined within the past three months – following the ‘Stages of team development’ philosophy, each team goes through a Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing phase. Our team should now be at the ‘Forming’ stage, however I feel like the team bypassed all the initial stages and jumped straight to the ‘Performing’ stage. The drive within our team is just brilliant!

Q: Diversity & Inclusion continues to be a priority at Fidelity. How are you ensuring diversity in FDAS?

Sheila: I really do believe in the benefits of having a diverse team, which starts by being aware of our makeup and determining potential areas where we might be lacking. I keep an eye out for traits in our candidate pipeline and will sometimes ask to interview someone even if I feel that their experience does not 100% match. I look at everything a candidate has to offer.

Q: What would you tell someone who’s interested in working at Fidelity? How would you describe the company?

Sheila: From a personal perspective – I think the support that Fidelity has offered us during this pandemic is second to none. On top of this, the suite of benefits offered by Fidelity to their employees are top notch – pension, yearly bonus, healthcare, learning and development, remote working, lifestyle benefits, to name a few. From a work perspective – Fidelity offers a diversity of career choices, and all with a fresh challenge. There are many ways to build the career you want by leveraging several resources – training, certification, communities of practice, mentoring opportunities, Employee Resource Groups/Special Interest Groups, etc.

Q: You mentioned Employee Resource Groups/Special Interest Groups, etc. Tell us about your experiences and the impact this involvement may have on you personally or professionally.

Sheila: I have been a member of Women’s Leadership Group (WLG) as well as Women In Technology Special Interest Group (WITSIG) in Ireland for about two years now. I think it’s so important to take our head out of the day-to-day delivery and see how we can give back to the wider Fidelity organization and how we can help grow and influence our female pipeline for IT.

Over the past two years, I’ve been involved in some super initiatives, the following are the ones which impacted me the most:

  • Career for Girls – This is an annual event where the Ireland WITSIG community host a school to share the various elements of a career in technology in a fun and encouraging way. We host coding and gaming workshops as well as inviting speakers to share their experiences and introduce our audience to the excitement and possibilities of technology, proving that technology is for everyone.
  • RESUME Hiring Event – Members of WITSIG Ireland volunteered to facilitate breakouts rooms which contained technologists who were looking to return to work and were looking for advice and ideas on how to RESUME their career in Technology.
  • Women @ Work – An engagement with Business in the Community (BITC) for women who have completed employability programs and need further help to kick start their career in Technology.
  • Global WITATHON – Our WIT-A-THON is an internal Hackathon event aimed at Women In Technology across Ireland, India and the US in Fidelity. In 2020, I was delighted to be on the Global Committee who organized this event, and I was even more delighted when a Team in Ireland won the event.

As well as the above, I am also part of a D&I working group which works across three of our Business Units in Ireland. The purpose of this working group is the communicate the importance of D&I in the workplace and promote simple things which we can do as a group to influence aspects of Diversity and Inclusion.

We encourage you to learn more about Fidelity Digital Assets or explore opportunities with Fidelity Digital Assets in the United States or internationally.