Gen Z Women
FIRST FIVE PROGRAM
Award-winning professional development for Early Career Women navigating male-dominated industries.
Early Career Women face numerous obstacles in the workplace. And gender is only one of them.
Gen Z women enter male-dominated industries determined, dedicated, and ready to contribute. But they're learning the unwritten rules of professional life while being managed by people shaped by a different generation's values and expectations, inside industries still largely built around historical gendered norms.
Each layer is manageable on its own. But together, they amplify the natural uncertainty of early career, putting retention, participation, and progression into leadership at real risk, right when it matters most.
Multifaceted support for maximum professional development
The First Five Program has been built over years of experience working specifically with Gen Z women in male-dominated industries. It starts by building an understanding of the landscape they're navigating - how their confidence and competency shapes their sense of value and contribution - alongside the professional skills to maximise participation, visibility, respect, and relationships at work.
Importantly, this development doesn't happen in isolation. Participants connect with peers at a similar career stage and experienced women already leading in industry, addressing isolation many feel unnamed. Their managers are trained alongside them, and employers receive data and recommendations to sustain what the program starts.
Truly effective professional development happens when it's scaffolded, not delivered in a single session and left to fade. Every part of the program reinforces the next, so participants, managers, and organisations are all moving in the same direction at once.
The result is a foundation that holds: for the participant navigating what comes next, and for the organisation counting on her to stay, grow, and lead.
Over 350 early career women across 50+ companies internationally:
CURRICULUM OVERVIEW
For early-career women, participation at work is shaped by more than capability alone.
Confidence, influence, and progression are affected by context, power dynamics, and lived experience - making deliberate, applied skill-building essential.
Observable program outcomes
Designed to create observable, progressive change over ten weeks - translating early-career capability into behaviours and outcomes organisations can see, support and retain.
Phase 1: Confidence & Decision-Making
Phase 2: Participation & Influence
Phase 3: Communication & Boundaries
Phase 4: Progression & Retention
Key 2027 Cohort Dates
Each cohort is intentionally capped at 30 participants. This size is small enough to foster trust, psychological safety, and meaningful participation, yet large enough to bring together a mix of perspectives and experiences. This allows participants to engage actively, build trusted peer relationships, and receive practical, applied support throughout the program
1st Oct 2026
Registrations Open
29th Jan 2027
Registrations Close (or when capacity reached)
23rd Feb 2027
10-week Program Commences
1st March 2027
Registrations Open
3rd May 2027
Registrations Close (or when capacity reached)
1st June 2027
10-week Program Commences
24th May 2026
Registrations Open
30th July 2027
Registrations Close (or when capacity reached)
24th Aug 2027
10-week Program Commences
More women means better business.
The pursuit of gender equality is complex - from recruitment challenges to successfully getting women back from maternity leave to historical glass ceilings.
However, when leaders ask me what will create the strongest long-term change within their organisation, my answer never varies:
Focus on keeping and empowering the young women you already have.
The truth is, a large reason we're in this position (still 100 years to equality!) is because we tend to take the earliest part of the pipeline for granted. When women who are new to their careers feel like valued contributors, they'll stay long enough to be promoted into leadership positions, they'll attract other women, and they'll want to come back from mat leave.
Is it really that simple? I believe it is. And when you see what your early career women can really do with the support of the First Five Program, you'll believe it, too.
Tanya Andrews, First Five Program Lead Facilitator
Founder of Trellis Collective, Girl Shaped Flames, and UNIQ You
Trellis Collective acknowledges and pays respect to the past, present and future Traditional Custodians and Elders of this nation and the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
