Why stepping up to even the hardest tasks proved a key asset for Julia

Julia Raue is a natural problem solver. As a child she used to sit at her father’s workbench and take things apart before putting them back together. Now an independent director with experience in a range of industries, she got her start in IT by helping solve a problem she had identified while on a summer internship.

A law student at the time, Julia took a job at Auckland Council, where she was part of the typing pool in the planning department. Every afternoon a heavily pregnant IT specialist would come along to back up data by changing the tapes in the typing machines, a task that required her to get on her hands and knees under people’s desks.

Seeing an obvious problem, Julia offered to do the updates for her and when the woman went on maternity leave, Julia was offered a one-year contract to cover for her. She intended to return to law school after the year, with money in hand for fees, but she quickly found she had a passion for IT. She followed her time at Auckland Council with a variety of contract roles.

Be ready to grab opportunities

“It wasn't unusual for me to go somewhere, realise I could do much more, learn the systems and become the expert,” she says. Case in point: six months after joining Vodafone the people who trained Julia were coming to her with questions.

While on a three-month contract with Presbyterian Support, she changed the way they structured their software agreements to save them money. “I saved money to spend it in a different way, which was not too dissimilar to how my mum ran our home budget.”

She was offered a permanent role and negotiated to study IT at the same time.

She became the first female certified Novell network engineer in New Zealand and then the IT Manager at Presbyterian Support.

Take on problems other people don’t want

Her career strategy was to “extract value for the organisation and the customer”. She also stepped up to tasks that other people rejected as too hard. “People notice when you solve a bigger problem that maybe other people have failed to solve,” she says.

Julia joined Air New Zealand as a junior project manager and left as the company’s

Chief Information Officer. Every time she was asked to take on a piece of work she wasn’t sure she could do, a senior executive would tell her, “Oh, you’ll figure it out”, and she did. From recovering assets worth millions after the Ansett-Air New Zealand merger collapsed, to running the company’s data centre, to getting the digital shopfront up and running, she did it all and loved it.

That’s not to say there weren’t times when she suffered from imposter syndrome. When she became Air New Zealand’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) she set up a group of top CIOs to act as a sounding board. But she soon discovered that she thought very differently to the others who were all male and began to second guess herself. “It made me start to lose sleep, so I stopped going to my own group that I’d set up because I was losing confidence through the things that others said.”

When the time is right, leap

Air New Zealand was a dream gig, but Julia was working “24/7” and she wanted a change that would better suit her family. In her last year with Air New Zealand she joined the TVNZ board of directors, thinking directorship might be a way to better balance her work and home life in the future. One year in she decided that the future was now and became an independent director for a number of organisations including The Warehouse, Southern Cross Medical Society and Jade Software.

All of the organisations that Julia works with have female leaders on the executive team, which is a significant shift from the beginning of her career - not that being outnumbered ever bothered her.

“People would ask, ‘How do you feel being the only female in the room?’ and sometimes I hadn't noticed, because I just wasn't raised that way.”