In this episode, Priya and Sridhar Parthasarathy share their perspectives with Sivaguru on:
- Priya’s determination to do MCA, after missing an opportunity to do engineering in Bidar
- Starting her career with Robert Bosch and moving on to Mascot and Wipro as a project leader and getting into ERP solutions
- Setting up the EAI practice in Cognizant
- Wanting to contribute to the Digital India initiative and taking up a role in NASSCOM
- Sridhar’s journey starting at BITS Pilani and a small firm before doing his masters and then to Tata Unisys, before joining Wipro
- Now, a cybersecurity consultant, managing his own venture, Purple Team
- How the excellent support from family has been helping Priya both at home and career, complemented by the guidance from supervisors and managers at work
- Priya’s experience of setting up and growing the EAI practice
- Sridhar shares how he saw his mother being a career woman and was keen on marrying a career woman
- His philosophy of having relationships based on equality and mutual respect
- The support he gets from Priya in his career movement decisions
- Being sounding boards from the industry for each other
- Sridhar also shares instances where he was able to encourage and support women facing some challenges at work, due to demands on their time or commute
- How, Having a woman entrepreneur in the team helps create the empathy needed at the workplace
- Possible reasons why we find few women in cybersecurity
- The impact of working from home on balancing work and personal demands
- Their views on IT as a career choice and mid career questions that many of us face
Priya is spearheading NASSCOM’s Future Skills initiative with the remit of skilling/reskilling/upskilling of over 4 million people in cybersecurity for India by 2025. She has seen all the opportunities and challenges that women encounter both as an engineer and as a leader. Prior to her stint in NASSCOM she was heading Cognizant’s Security practice. Priya is an alumna of SJCE Mysore.
Contacts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priya-madhavan-b79a3714/
Future Skills: https://futureskills.nasscom.in/
Sridhar heads the cybersecurity consulting firm Purple Team, specializing in cloud security. In the 30+ years he has been in the Indian software industry he has been trying figure out what makes it tick. Every time he thinks he has, they change the rules!
Reach him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridharparthasarathy/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sridhu
Webpage: www.purpleteam.in
