Empowering Black Professionals in the Digital Age

Cher Jones is a Corporate Social Media Trainer & Personal Branding Coach with the love of technology hardwired into her personality. As the founder of Socially Active Training, she leverages over 20 years of PR, marketing and broadcasting experience to help professionals, leaders and consultants develop a credible and strategic online presence while teaching them how to use social media at work for work. Her passion, knowledge and expertise have many referring to her as one of North America's leading experts in online personal branding for professionals. She has worked internationally with a wide variety of organizations including Rogers, Hong Kong Police, PokerStars, BlackBerry, Industrial Alliance, The City of Toronto, MPI, The UK Trade and Investment, The Ontario Ministry of Education and CBC to name a few. Cher is also the host of a weekly LinkedIn livestream called #JustAskCher LIVE where she offers tips and advice to help you develop a powerful and professional brand online! Linkedin profile- www.linkedin.com/in/itscherjones

Hayden is accountable for Delivery Excellence, Software Engineering and Quality Engineering Testing at Manulife. He started his Manulife career in 2011 as the Director, Microsoft Technologies working with Segment teams to design and deploy Microsoft technologies and also manage the Microsoft/Manulife relationship. Since then he has held a number of strategic and operational IT roles as well as segment-based IT Risk Management roles. He is a passionate supporter and champion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace and is active within the Manulife Black Experiences ERG (VIBE Canada) and the Global Technology DEI Council. Outside of work, when he is not training for triathlons, he enjoys spending time with family and friends.

Gary is a science, and experimental learning geek by nature. He is passionate about learning and he continues to feed his thirst for knowledge by tackling different project that test his limits both personally and professionally. He has a well established background in the startup and entrepreneurship sector. However, he also possesses a wide array of knowledge in fields such as physics, software engineering, software architecture, enterprise architecture, engineering transformation, talent management and career framework management. “Failure is an option – If we learn from it”

Sadique is an accomplished technology leader with a consistent track record of delivering results and value-added service with a focus on modernizing data and analytics platforms and championing analytics driven business to achieve revenue growth while reducing technology investment (TCO). I have effectively partnered with senior leadership and collaborated across the organization to drive measurable business benefits from data and analytics investments. I have implemented large scale and complex technology solutions across business domains including financial services, pension funds, retail, loyalty management, insurance, fraud, cyber security, risk and compliance. Sadique is experienced in leading large scale transformational projects in Cloud, Cloud migration and On-prem Big Data space focused on Data Integration, Data Lake, Advanced Analytics (Machine learning/AI) and Reporting. He is also experienced in implementing advanced analytics use cases in banking, customer experience, insurance, fraud, AML, digital and quant trading. Prior to his current role, Sadique held leadership roles in data & analytics space at TD Bank, Scotiabank and CPP Investments.