Building career confidence for defence and veteran partners
Are you a female partner or widow of a current or former serving Australian Defence Force (ADF) member? Has your career been impacted by your loved one’s defence career? Would you like to build career confidence and embrace leadership with confidence? In 2025 the Rise Together Initiative will provide 12 defence and veteran partners with the ability to undertake the Women in Leadership Development Program.
The aim of the Rise Together Initiative is to build the career confidence of defence and veteran partners. Directly addressing the negative impacts of defence service on their careers. This journey started with one war widow who wanted to support career development for defence and veteran spouses.
This initiative has been officially announced at Parliament House by Senator Katy Gallagher, after she spent some time meeting and hearing experiences from veteran partners themselves, alongside our Board Chair, Tricia Hobson, and our CEO, Renee Wilson.
Why defence and veteran partners need the Rise Together Initiative
Families of veterans make unique sacrifices when supporting their loved one, both during and after ADF service. Families of veterans balance the many demands of supporting family, relocations and adjustments, deployments and other absence from home, transition out of service and caring roles due to illness or injury.
Career satisfaction is an important element of wellbeing. We acknowledge that veteran families may face barriers in developing and maintaining their career aspirations due to the unique nature of defence life, increasing their risk of unemployment and underemployment. The purpose of this initiative is to encourage partners of former or current serving ADF members to focus on self-care and expand their careers by engaging in a Women in Leadership Development (WILD) program with like-minded peers.
Throughout WILD you will explore several critical topics, including:
- Personal leadership style; understand your individual strengths and style – how you can best leverage those strengths and when they might get in the way.
- Leadership, management & technical work; you will better understand the differences between leadership, management and technical work, when you use each type of work and where they overlap.
- Influence & impact; explore influence at the micro level, and at the system level and draw on tools and models to increase your awareness and impact.
- Resilience & thriving; learn how to build your psychological flexibility and thrive to enable you to manage the challenges presented in your role.
- Leading self & others through change; understand the barriers to change and how to support yourself, others, teams and organisations move through change.
- Leading with purpose; understand and anchor to what matters most; leading with purpose can help sustain you through tough challenges.
- Breakthrough conversations; learn and practise a framework to hold conversations that can feel difficult.
- Reflective practice; a critical part of the learning cycle is creating space for reflection. Learn a framework and practice self-reflection during and between sessions.
If you’re interested, please find more in-depth information about what the WILD program can provide for you and your career and what the requirements are to apply here.
“Thank you Families of Veterans Guild for the opportunity to attend the Women in Leadership Development (WILD) program of 2024. I am continually evolving in both personal and professional development and through this scholarship opportunity my growth will continue to expand throughout the course across to positive contributions in future roles.”
– Mary Kingsford, 2024 WILD Scholarship Recipient
Watch our video here of Katy Gallagher alongside our Board Chair, Tricia Hobson, and our CEO, Renee Wilson and their words about the importance of this initiative.
