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At a time when Australia's workforce is dramatically shrinking, providing women with better development opportunities and focusing on retention should be a priority for any company.

Our analysis told us that we had a bottleneck emerging of women in middle management positions who were not breaking through to senior roles. This issue is being tackled head-on by Niki Kesoglou, Stream Leader, Diversity, as part of our broader diversity strategy.

We've come a long way since we hired our first female employee in 1898, with over 65% of our workforce now female. Today, over 40% of management positions are held by women. But we continue to look at training and development programs we can provide to support women in breaking through to higher levels of management.

We have been working hard to increase the levels of women in management for a while now.

And since 1994, the percentage of women in management positions has increased by 200%, but we needed to do more.

So in March 2004, we piloted a development program – Westpac Women: Achieving their Potential – to inspire and assist women in middle management positions and to address the barriers women face, both internal and external, to achieving their career potential. Around 30 women took part in this initial pilot, representing all areas of our business.

Now, 18 months on, we have refined the program and have integrated it into our mainstream leadership training for women.

Westpac Women: Achieving their Potential helps participants develop a comprehensive career plan and increase personal and organisational skills and effectiveness. The program consists of three main components:

1.	Three one-day workshops, covering topics such as work-life integration; gender diff erences in communication; networking; mentoring and personal brand;
2.	Four one-on-one coaching sessions to focus on development and career planning; and
3.	Involvement in a team project, focusing on a diversity-related organisational topic, the outcomes of which are later presented to Westpac senior management.

Initial feedback and results from the program have been encouraging. Over 60 employees have now completed the course, with around 23% of participants saying they have since been promoted and 19% indicating they have moved sideways into other areas to increase their skills. In addition, women who have completed the course stated that they believe the course will add value to their current role.

We have also found that, not only has this program been good for individual development, the action learning component is also assisting the organisation with recommended solutions to diversity related issues currently being implemented across our business.

For example, recommendations made by one of the team projects outlined barriers and solutions to flexible work. Their recommendations around technology issues and the need for better tools were incorporated into our telecommuting pilot undertaken this year.

Recommendations from most projects have also been considered in the development of 'Create the Difference', another new leadership program assisting all managers in understanding how to recognise and value differences between people and how to build a flexible, high performing team.

While Westpac Women: Achieving their Potential is not seen as the 'silver bullet' to gender issues within Westpac, it is seen as another tool to eliminate the barriers women face in rising to senior roles.

We believe this is another important step in our long and proud history in providing workplace-friendly benefits and conditions for women. This is why we continue to be recognised by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) as an Employer of Choice for Women.