Lauren Cislowski works in the Technology Consulting team at EY, specialising in user experience design. But that’s not where the story begins: back in 2016, she was in Year 11 at Mount Annan High School in Sydney’s southwest when a new principal brought with him a relationship with ABCN.

As part of EY Care Day, a school volunteering event organised by ABCN, she was speaking to a mentor who explained he was a management consultant. Lauren had never heard of that job before but thought solving complex problems for businesses sounded like a ‘really cool career’, and the seed was sown.

‘I didn’t really know what I wanted to do … I just knew that I wanted to work in tech and I wanted to be creative,’ she said.

During her final year at school, Lauren studied multimedia and completed several ABCN programs, such as the Senior Leadership Forum and our InRoads program, where corporate mentors helped her to develop the skills and confidence she needed to navigate her post-school options.    

After completing a Bachelor of Design Computing, which focused on human-computer interaction specialising in user-experience and user-interface design, Lauren took a gap year before starting to apply for jobs.

When thinking about what she wanted to do, Lauren thought back to her conversation with the consultant and the other EY people. She said, ‘They seemed like a good bunch of people, so I decided to apply for their graduate program and have been there ever since!’

Lauren’s work involves the user-interface design of interactive presentations for large tech companies, big banks and corporations. She gets to meet a lot of people and encounters many different business challenges and loves that every day is different.

Without the ABCN programs at her school, Lauren does not know what career path she would have followed. Her mother is a stay-at-home mum and her father a seed manager for an agriculture company.

She said, ‘There was no way that I would have even thought about consulting if I hadn’t spoken to that EY mentor because I just didn’t know that it was an option, he was very inspiring to me.’

In March this year Lauren went full circle on her ABCN journey. She volunteered as a mentor at the ABCN Digital Careers Expo, sharing her own career story and how she became a user experience designer with a new generation of students. Lauren said: