From career pivots and leadership development to resilience and confidence, professional growth has never been more important for women in tech.
In a fast-changing industry shaped by AI, disruption and evolving workplace expectations, these insightful reads offer practical advice, inspiring perspectives and actionable tools to help ambitious professionals navigate change, grow their influence and build fulfilling, future-focused careers.
Navigating Your Next: Discover the Career You Want and the Path to Get There by Julian Lighton (published by Advantage Books)
In an era of AI disruption, restructuring and evolving career paths, Navigating Your Next is a timely guide for professionals looking to take greater control of their working lives. Drawing on more than 30 years’ experience as a Silicon Valley strategist, executive coach and former Chief Strategy Officer at billion-dollar tech companies, Julian Lighton introduces a practical seven-step framework designed to help readers identify what they truly want from their careers and how to achieve it.
Going beyond generic career advice, it offers actionable strategies for understanding your personal value proposition, communicating strengths with confidence and navigating career progression in competitive environments. Whether you’re stepping into leadership, considering a pivot, or reassessing long-term goals, Lighton provides practical tools to clarify direction and build a career aligned with both ambition and fulfilment.
Grounded in real-world experience rather than theory alone, Navigating Your Next is a well-written, confidence-building read for anyone looking to shape a more intentional and rewarding future in tech.
Her Play: Make Your Own Luck by Karolina Pelc
Karolina Pelc’s career began not in a corner office but on the casino floor of post-communist Poland. What followed was a decades-long journey across countries, industries, and high-stakes environments before she founded, scaled, and sold her startup to FanDuel, the top gaming brand in the U.S., in under three years.
Her Play: Make Your Own Luck is the memoir behind that journey. Pelc writes with unflinching honesty about the realities of building a career in male-dominated industries, where every decision is visible, and the margin for error is thin. She traces the full arc: the gritty early years on cruise ships and casino floors, the leap into online gaming and tech, the public setbacks and private heartbreaks, and the sustained uncertainty that runs beneath any visible success.
This is a frank account of how ambition actually works, shaped by doubt, risk, and the willingness to move forward when outcomes are far from guaranteed. Drawing on her own mindset framework, Pelc examines how inherited beliefs get broken, how setbacks get reframed, and how opportunities are often built long before they arrive.
A memoir about instinct, resilience, and learning to make your own luck.
Why is SHE Still Here? My Ungraceful Journey from the Playground to the Boardroom by Patty Azzarello
Patty Azzarello became the youngest general manager at Hewlett-Packard at thirty-three, ran a billion-dollar software business at thirty-five, and reached the CEO chair at thirty-eight. But the path there was anything but smooth.
Why Is SHE Still Here? is the frank memoir behind those milestones. Azzarello writes about navigating sexism, imposter syndrome, introversion, and fear across decades in male-dominated workplaces, where low expectations were often the default and being overlooked was routine. The stories are sometimes absurd, sometimes painful: being forgotten and locked inside a high-security office, believing she had been stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island, falling off a stage in front of thousands. Through each of them, she found a way forward.
The book is built around what Azzarello calls secret passageways, the hard-won lessons embedded in lived experience. A crowded childhood taught her to negotiate. Being bullied taught her that cruelty reflects the bully, not the target. A post-career autism diagnosis reframed her entire relationship with motivation and workplace dynamics.
The result is less a leadership manual and more an honest account of what it takes to claim your seat and stay in it. Practical, personal, and genuinely encouraging for anyone who has ever questioned whether they belong.
Graceful Power: Solving the paradox of modern leadership by Sally Netherwood (published by Practical Inspiration Publishing)
Modern leadership often comes with impossible expectations: be decisive yet empathetic, ambitious yet approachable, resilient yet vulnerable. In Graceful Power, leadership coach Sally Netherwood explores how today’s most effective leaders successfully balance these demands through what she calls ‘Graceful Power’ – a leadership approach built on congruence, courage and compassion. Drawing on more than 25 years of coaching experience with leaders at organisations including Expedia Group and DoorDash, Netherwood provides practical leadership tools that can be applied immediately.
The book reframes emotional intelligence, self-awareness and authentic communication as strategic advantages rather than soft skills. It’s also an especially valuable read for professionals aspiring to step into leadership roles, helping readers build the mindset, habits and confidence needed to thrive and lead effectively when they get there. Packed with practical exercises and relatable examples, Graceful Power provides a strong foundation for developing influence, building trust and navigating leadership challenges with clarity, resilience and humanity.
Age Against the Machine: New rules for working in an ageist world by Lucy Standing, Martin Hyde and Maggi Evans (published by De Gruyter)
The working world sees age as a problem. It is time to show them it is an asset. This new book from a chartered psychologist, a professor of management and chartered occupational psychologist lifts the veil on retirement, ageism at work and a broken system that serves neither employer nor employee.
People are living longer and want to be valuable, happy and purposeful well into their 80s and 90s. They need lifelong ways of working and earning that fit around values, care responsibilities, lifestyle and flexibility. And with their peak emotional and social intelligence, judgement, discernment and lived experience – why shouldn’t they have it? You are not too old. The system is broken. We need some new rules.
Providing a framework for navigating change in an ageist world, this book shows readers how to be a constructive age activist so they can become part of the solution. Age Against The Machine is a vital read and packed with real life stories of change and guidance for anyone who has ever wanted to get more out of work.
Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure’s Funk by Dr. Melisa Buie, Keeley Hurley and Noël Kreidler (published by Practical Inspiration Publishing)
While most books tell us to “fail fast” and “bounce back,” Faceplant by Dr. Melisa Buie, alongside Keeley Hurley and Noël Kreidler, tackles the important work of what actually happens in the aftermath – the emotional fallout that paralyzes millions and prevents them from trying again.
Built on the FREE framework (Focus, Reflect, Explore, Engage), this powerful, science-backed guide combines neuroscience, learning theory, and 30+ years of applied experience to help readers decode their subconscious patterns around failure, calm the threat response it triggers – and transform setbacks into catalysts for growth.
Eschewing generic resilience advice in favour of actionable, step-by-step guidance blending both technical excellence and emotional honesty, Faceplant is a must-read for high-achieving women in tech paralyzed by their own standards, leaders building safe-to-fail cultures, and anyone navigating job instability and AI-driven disruption.
