Auto30Club Key Achievements in 2024/25

We held 23 digital meetings across the year, for members to share best practice.

One All Members Meeting in February to share the key points for the female representation report.

Two Patron meetings - where we discussed key issues affecting the automotive landscape.

Three OEM Closed Circle Meetings - the group of OEM HR professionals focused discussions on how to increase female representation in middle and senior management, particularly exploring how we can help women to become “board ready”.

Three Silver Members’ meetings - guest speakers included Sophie Norris of Bentley, Clare Booth of Scania, and Karen Greenwood of Solus Accident Repair Centres. This group will expand in 2025 to also include Gold members.

Four 30 by 30 leaders meetings - guest speakers included Joeli Brearley Founder of Pregnant then Screwed talking about preventing the Motherhood Penalty, and Monica Atwal of Clarks Legal (pictured) advising us on the new employer obligations relating to the Workers Protection Act. We also ran an extra meeting covering women’s safety at industry events, and Auto Trader kindly funded a training session for our 30 by 30 leaders, delivered by Consent Collective. Julia Muir also scheduled individual meetings with all Retailer MDs to discuss this issue in depth.

Four Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) Group Meetings - with key topics covering Recruitment, Promotion, Mentoring, Sponsoring, Coaching and Leadership Programmes. Guest speakers included Julia Philpott of JP Leadership Coaching that led to us launching a female leadership coaching cohort with Julia and several women from our member companies. We also welcomed Sally Foote and Sarah Blewitt of Carwow (both pictured) talking about their highly successful Confidence Project.

Six Early Careers Group Meetings.

Guest speakers included Jenny Bicknell of Get My First Job, Nick Chambers of Education and Employers, and Louise Taylor and Sophie Feechan of Enterprise Mobility.

Our meetings are always supported with contributions by Jen Miller and Carole Anne McCann of our Early Careers Group sponsor Arnold Clark.

We ran three campaigns across the year on LinkedIn and helped our members by providing resources to take two of the campaigns into schools.

Who Inspires You?

This campaign has a dual purpose - to recognise and celebrate the amazing women who are helping to drive the inclusive culture change in the sector, and also to showcase the diversity of the women, their roles, their career journeys and the different actions they are taking to ensure women will thrive in the industry. The campaign ran from July 1st to 4th. We held a launch meeting and provided advice and support materials.

• Read more about the Who Inspires You? campaign

This Girl Is Me

The purpose of this campaign is to show automotive employers how they can promote our female employees as relatable role models for young women, to encourage them to consider careers in the sector. It marked International Day of the Girl and ran from October 13th to 17th, and was driven by our Early Careers group members and the group sponsor Arnold Clark. We held a launch meeting and supplied support materials for participants and materials for members to use in school visits.

• Read more about the This Girl Is Me campaign

In the 2024 LinkedIn campaign we featured 136 women from 34 companies, sharing their personal stories and showcasing 121 different automotive job roles.

My Apprenticeship Story

This campaign serves to encourage automotive employers to promote their apprenticeships to a much wider talent pool by showcasing relatable female apprentices. Our experience indicates that male only apprentice role models do not appeal to young women because they reinforce gender stereotypes, whereas female role models appeal equally to both male and female students. The LinkedIn campaign ran from and featured 34 female apprentices from 22 different companies sharing their personal career stories. This campaign was also driven by our Early Careers Group and sponsored by Arnold Clark. We held a launch meeting for all members and supplied support materials for participants and materials for members to use in school visits.

• Read more about the My Apprenticeship Story campaign

14 Change the Game Workshops

Julia Muir delivered 8 on-site Change the Game workshops to the top teams of Nissan GB, Bentley, Santander Consumer Finance, Hyundai Capital UK, Direct Line Group Auto Services, Steer Automotive Group. Assisted by Jane Cusdin, Associate of the Auto30Club, she also delivered 6 digital workshops to Oodle Car Finance, Loyalty Logistix, Auto Windscreens, Direct Affinity, Hills Motor Group and Peoples Automotive Group.