Rashada’s Biography

Rashada is recognized as one of the UK’s top 100 Ethnic Minority Leaders (Empower and Yahoo, June 2020) and Most Influential women in UK tech (Computer weekly 2022). She is most recognized for her thoughts on diversity in the workplace, employee engagement and helping the next generation of talent reach their potential in Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Maths careers.

In a professional capacity, Rashada is an Enterprise Technologist at Amazon Web Services in the UK. She possesses a strong track record of new business development, account management, and consultative selling into Enterprise client organisations.

Prior to joining AWS, she spent 9 years with Cisco. Rashada joined as the only Black female in the highly competitive Sales academy program which spanned across Europe. It was during this program that she believed more needed to be done to bring more diverse talent into the technology industry.

In 2011 Rashada co-founded and launched the award-winning Your Future, Your Ambition (YFYA) initiative 2012 as a vehicle to help corporate organisations and students connect and help to bridge the diversity gap in STEAM. To date, YFYA has opened its doors to over 12,000 students and has helped to build a successful pipeline of STEAM talent in the UK.

Rashada has been recognized by the UK Prime Minister for her volunteer work and for helping the next generation and was awarded the UK Point of Light award in 2018. She has been named of a top 50 most inspiring and influential Black voices in UK tech (Tech Nation, 2019) she was a highly commended finalist in the 2019 WinTrade Awards.

Rashada presently sits on the board of Engineering UK, and the UK’s first black theatre company, TALAWA. She is an inclusion ambassador at Amazon and co-lead of the Women@AWS network and frequently contributes to industry publications including the New Scientist, DiversityQ, and The Times Newspaper.

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