Women in Data: MoD’s first chief data officer on overcoming imposter syndrome

Being different

Since the MoD appointed Bellamy as its first CDO, a team is now developing around the data function. When she arrived, Bellamy was on her own, but now she has a leadership team, a growing staff, and they’re working with partners across government, industry and internationally.

Although Bellamy is proud of her position as a non-military female leader at the MoD, initially she had strong reservations about joining the organisation due to her differences. After a stint in advertising, she switched to data specialist Dunnhumby, retail marketing at Sainsbury’s, and various data roles at energy firm Centrica.

She then took a career gap and travelled to Africa to work out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

“This is something I’d encourage and offer people. I needed to re-find myself a little bit. I’d been on a treadmill, I was successful and young, and I headed off to Africa,” she said.

“We cannot challenge a world that is so different by using the same people with the same thinking. If I don’t have people who think differently from me in the room, we are going to get an echo chamber of my thoughts. That’s unacceptable”

Caroline Bellamy, Ministry of Defence

During her time abroad, Bellamy met a southern African man, whom she married and they now have two sons. On her return, she moved to the telecoms industry, joining Vodafone UK, and then Ordnance Survey as CDO.

“Then I got a phone call from defence. ‘Caroline, you’ve got a really interesting career, come to defence.’ ‘I’ve no military background, I’ve never worked in defence, I have no skills or abilities to join your organisation. Why would I join?’,” she said.

Bellamy turned the job down flat. But the MoD kept up its pursuit, and she ended up joining, discovering that being different was a positive.

“I was welcomed because I was different, because I didn’t have either a pure military or signals background from a military point of view, I was welcomed with my different skills,” she said. And it has turned out to be one of the best decisions of her life.

“We keep the nation safe and we help it prosper. We do some of the coolest data and analytics work you can imagine on the planet. If it’s a cool tool, we’ve got it,” she said.

Different thinking

As her team is expanding, Bellamy is keenly aware of how vital representation and inclusivity is for defence. At the MoD, she’s working to bring in different thinking, including people from different demographics and from different industries, so staff can hear and learn from new ideas.

“In our world, the changing threat surface is incredible. We cannot challenge a world that is so different by using the same people with the same thinking,” she said. “If I don’t have people who think differently from me in the room, we are going to get an echo chamber of my thoughts. That’s unacceptable.”

Bellamy noted that if the data the MoD uses to build algorithms and make decisions is not representative of all the people the organisation is serving or the entire population it’s trying to understand, then it will fail.

“You need to create a leadership situation that allows you to be challenged,” she said. “We need to do that safely and we need diversity of thought. We need all the diversities that we can see, but we need all the diversities as well that we can’t see. We need intellectual diversity, experience diversity, age diversity.”

Building and leading a truly diverse team means being prepared to lead in difficult situations and creating a platform for having difficult conversations: “It’s creating enough safety for people to say, ‘you’re not representing me in what you’re saying’, or ‘I’m not represented in that room’, or ‘how do I get my voice heard?’”

As she outlined the challenges and opportunities for women in non-traditional industries like defence, Bellamy encouraged others to join her.

“For those of you who are feeling any imposter syndrome because you don’t have a pure STEM [science, technology, engineering, maths] career – don’t. I’ve reached a reasonable level of seniority and I don’t have a pure STEM background. You can get there through other routes. I’m an economist by education and I had no clue what I wanted to do.”

Another tip – find a role that lets you carry on learning. While Bellamy has worked in many different sectors, she ended up doing a similar job in quite a few places.

“Going into the defence sector, a completely new industry sector with a huge global footprint, I didn’t understand it. In my mid to late fifties, I could carry on the learning curve. That’s a powerful thing.”