Welcome to the October edition of the Source & Connect newsletter.

This month, we look back on our Women in the D365 Community event in London – including Kerry Hughes Wright's keynote and Sally Spicer 's workshop – and share the date of our Christmas event. We also feature Episode 20 of the D365 Insights podcast - which asks whether women in tech are still fighting the same battles - look at where manufacturing and FMCG teams are building capability and round up the latest live roles across the sector.

This newsletter is for Dynamics end users, partners and consultants involved in delivery day to day.

Director's Notes

It's hard to believe we are already in October!

September was a memorable month for us. We celebrated our strongest quarter to date, welcomed new clients, continued to support organisations investing in Dynamics 365 and hosted our Women in the D365 Community event in London, which exceeded all expectations.

A highlight was seeing so many talented women come together to share experiences, advice and encouragement. The atmosphere in the room was incredible and reinforced why we created the community. A huge thank you to everyone who attended and contributed.

I also recorded one of our first in-person D365 Insights podcast episodes. After years of recording remotely, it was refreshing to sit down face to face. The episode sparked fantastic discussion and is well worth a listen if you haven't heard it yet.

Manufacturing and FMCG remain areas of significant activity for us. We're supporting one of our key manufacturing clients with several strategic in-house appointments, helping them build the capability to maximise their Dynamics investment long after implementation. It's rewarding to partner with organisations that value investing in people, not just technology.

On a personal note, my little boy turns four this month. When I founded Source & Connect, he was nine months old, so in many ways I've spent the last four years raising two babies. Looking back at how much both have grown is rewarding. What started as an idea during maternity leave is now a thriving business, and seeing our milestones alongside his gives me perspective on how far we've come.

We're proud of a fantastic quarter and will keep working just as hard. Q4 is traditionally one of the busiest periods of the year, with businesses finalising transformation plans, preparing budgets and strengthening teams ahead of the new year. We look forward to helping even more organisations hire the right people and even more professionals find the right roles.

As always, thank you for being part of our community.

Sarah Moody 

Director, Source & Connect

Women in the D365 Community: "Who else can we invite in?"

On Wednesday 23rd September, women from across the D365 community gathered in London for an afternoon that was better than we had hoped. It began with a raw, honest and emotional keynote and ended with a room full of women with a clearer sense of what they want from their careers.

Keynote: Kerry Hughes-Wright, from Telex to AI

Kerry Hughes Wright, D365 Programme Lead at adapa Group, started work in 1983 on a Youth Training Scheme, earning £25 a week as a clerical assistant for a valve merchant. More than four decades later, she leads global transformation programmes and is watching AI reshape the workplace all over again.

Her career, she told us, was never planned. It was built from opportunities taken, opportunities created, risks that paid off and setbacks that didn't feel helpful at the time. Some of her most important decisions were steps sideways or backwards.

Back yourself before you feel ready. Around 1993, Kerry left a secure job to join the company that had implemented her employer's first management information system. She took a salary cut and a lodger to make ends meet. She worked alongside colleagues with far greater technical expertise, but she could understand the customer, organise and translate between technical people and the business. As she puts it, confidence doesn't always arrive before the opportunity. Sometimes you say yes, feel slightly terrified and work incredibly hard, and confidence catches up afterwards.

Stay curious and keep reinventing. Night school and an MBA taken while working full time were followed by a deliberate step backwards in 2010 to move into Microsoft Dynamics AX, trading some seniority for learning. She moved into CRM at Lloyd's of London in 2015, then to HCL PowerObjects. Today her work includes a global Dynamics transformation spanning more than 130 sites across 34 countries. In her view, a long career shouldn't leave you more fixed in what you know. It should give you the confidence to keep reinventing yourself.

Be honest about the hard parts. Kerry spoke candidly about being the only woman, or one of very few, in the room, and about being replaced in a leadership role by a less experienced male colleague after building and leading an area of the business. Experiences like that hurt, she said, but they force you to decide whether someone else's assessment of your value becomes your own. Hers didn't. She also spoke about imposter syndrome, which hasn't completely disappeared after 40+ years, though her relationship with it has changed. Feeling uncertain no longer means she doesn't belong.

Know your value beyond what you know. There will always be someone who knows more about a feature or product. What experience gives you is judgement, pattern recognition, the right questions and an understanding of people. Technology has changed beyond recognition since 1983, Kerry reminded us, but people have changed far less.

Leave the door open. This message stayed with the room. Kerry has benefited throughout her career from people who saw something in her, and she believes those of us with experience and influence have a responsibility to do the same. That might be mentoring, putting someone's name forward when they're not in the room, or simply saying, "Have you thought about doing this? I think you'd be good at it." Those small interventions can change careers.

Kerry closed with a question to take away from the event: who else can I bring through the door?

Read the full story in Kerry's LinkedIn article, From Telex to AI: What 40+ Years in Technology Has Taught Me, or listen to Sarah's interview with Kerry on the D365 Insights podcast.

Workshop: Taking Control of Your Career with Sally Spicer

Kerry's keynote set the tone, and Sally Spicer turned it into practice. Sally is a trained NLP coach who specialises in supporting women in mid-career, and an advocate and specialist in equity diversity and inclusion.

She is also a career and self-leadership coach for women and co-founder of Talent Included, which provides retained recruitment and consultancy to organisations hiring equity, diversity and inclusion specialists. Before that, she founded SCOACH Career Coaching and was Global Head of Talent and Inclusion at Gattaca, so she brings both a coach's and a hiring leader's perspective on what helps careers move forward. She hosts the podcast Taking Control of Your Career, created for women who know they are capable of more but feel stuck, overwhelmed or unsure where to start.

Sally's two-hour workshop on taking control of your career was full of wisdom. It tied neatly to Kerry's message that your career is yours to shape and that you are the best person to champion it.

OFFER! Sally has kindly offered the Source & Connect community 10% off her coaching courses. If you would like to take her up on it, please reach out to her directly.

Thank you to Kerry and Sally for their time and generosity, and to every woman who took part.

Save the date: our Christmas event

Our next event is on the 2nd December at 4pm in London. Interest is already high and spaces are limited, so we're sharing the date early.

• Early-bird places are available until the end of October.

• Not-for-profit: your contribution is towards only the room and refreshments.

• New this time: drinks and nibbles to get everyone in the Christmas spirit.

Comment WomenInD365 and we'll send you the details, including the early-bird price.

🎙️ D365 Insights by Source & Connect – New Episode

Episode 20: Women in Tech – Are We Still Fighting the Same Battles?

Following last month's Women in the D365 Community event, our 20th episode continues the conversation. Sarah is joined by two women who have spent years advocating for others in technology: Claire Mironik, Digital Services Change and Test Manager at Aston University and founder of WITBHAM – The Women In Tech UK; and Amandip Kaur Jheeta, Senior Director, Alliance Leader & Women in Alliances Lead, and Co-Chair of the Global Women's Inclusion Network at NTT DATA.

Claire started out on the service desk and deliberately chose technical roles. She went on to become a change manager in policing before joining Aston University, where she has built change and testing governance from the ground up. She founded the women-in-tech network WITBHAM, hosted a major event at Millennium Point this year and recently won the Editor's Choice award in the We Are Tech Women 100.

Amandip has more than 20 years' experience in the industry. When she joined NTT DATA's alliances team, she was the only woman leading an alliance partnership. The team now has a 50-50 gender split. She leads Women in Alliances, co-chairs NTT DATA's global women's network and won a Women in Tech Award in 2019 before hosting the awards last year.

Key themes from the episode:

• Technical roles are still the gap. Network and server teams remain predominantly male. Claire's toolkit for rewriting job roles at Aston University has already brought more women into applications and interviews.

• The middle is missing. More women are being hired at junior and senior levels, but talent is still lost in mid-career.

• Old assumptions remain. Women are still handed the note-taking or passed over for opportunities because of assumptions about parenting or caring responsibilities.

• The confidence gap is real. Women often wait until they meet 90% of a job spec, while men apply at 50%.

• Diversity isn't a tick box. Diverse interview panels and delivery teams bring diverse thinking, not just better numbers on an RFP.

• Allyship matters. Claire wants male colleagues to know they're welcome at women-in-tech events.

• Mentors and sponsors are different. A mentor shares experience and guidance; a sponsor recommends you to senior decision-makers and opens doors to new opportunities.

Claire also speaks candidly about the negative experiences that push women out of the industry, and about how a great mentor persuaded her to stay.

For clients and partners, the message is practical: review the language in your job adverts, separate essential skills from development opportunities and put diverse panels in front of candidates. Clients increasingly score partners on the diversity of their delivery teams, so it is good for business too.

For candidates, the message is to apply before you feel 100% ready and to seek out a mentor. Amandip's tip: reach out on LinkedIn and mention something specific a speaker said. It's often the start of a mentoring relationship.

In Claire's words: "We shouldn't really be in 2026 talking about these negative experiences that women are having. We should be welcoming them into tech."

🎧 Listen to D365 Insights by Source & Connect

Spotify | YouTube | Or search "D365 Insights by Source & Connect"

You can also join our Women in D365 Careers UK group on LinkedIn.

From Shop Floor to System

Manufacturing and FMCG remain our strongest niche, and activity shows no sign of slowing as we head into Q4. Here's where we've recently helped manufacturers build capability.

As Sarah mentioned above, we're supporting one of our key manufacturing clients with several strategic in-house appointments. It shows what it takes to get the most from Dynamics 365: the right people in the business long after the implementation partner has left, as well as the right people delivering the project.

Permanent: the roles that give a system an owner once it's live.

• Product Managers and Product Owners, who shape the roadmap and keep the business and the system aligned.

• Support Specialists, who keep operations running day to day and resolve issues before they reach the shop floor.

• Finance System Managers, who own the finance platform and ensure the numbers can be trusted.

Contract and implementation: specialists who bring deep, hands-on expertise to delivery.

• Finance and supply chain: Finance Consultants and Supply Chain Consultants.

• Warehouse and production: Advanced Warehousing Specialists, Production and Manufacturing Consultants and MRP Specialists.

• Data and service: Data Migration Consultants and Field Service Specialists.

Behind every one of these roles is a specific problem. A plan the business doesn't trust usually calls for strong MRP and planning expertise. A warehouse that isn't posting in real time needs advanced warehousing specialists who understand how the shop floor works. A system with no clear owner after go-live needs a product owner or support lead to take ownership of it. Next month we'll share the five problems we see most often and how the right people solve them.

If you're building a Dynamics team in manufacturing or FMCG, or looking for your next role in the sector, get in touch or see the live roles below.

💼 Current Dynamics Opportunities

View live permanent and contract roles across D365, Power Platform, CE, F&O and Business Central:

👉 https://www.sourceandconnect.co.uk/jobs