A made-in-India programme that has been equipping women graduates with technology skills is going to the US. It has been preconceived to empower underrepresented communities in the US.
Skilling solutions company TalentSprint, which launched Women Engineers (WE) in 2019 with the support of Google, is now offering the programme there.
“After the success of TalentSprint WE, we wondered whether we can take this to the US with an aim to target the underrepresented sections,” Santanu Paul, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, TalentSprint told businessline.
The company through its US arm TalentSprint Inc has now rolled out ‘TechWise’ and has started working in community colleges. “The goal of TechWise is to create a very interesting pool of high-quality engineers from underrepresented US students Google is also a sponsor for that,” Paul said.
Bridging gender gap in tech
“The programme addresses the socio-economic inclusion gap in tech,” Shiv Venkataraman, Vice President and General Manager of Google, told businessline in an email interaction. “TalentSprint has been taking care of the technical training, while Google leaders and engineers work closely with the students via 1:1 and group mentorship.”
Venkataraman said the 18-month TechWise is a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme.
“This is also an overlay programme that complements existing curricula, which aims to help participants discover their strengths and weaknesses. It also helps them get a deeper understanding of technical competencies to solve complex engineering problems,” he explained.
Students from Pennsylvania, Iowa, South Carolina, New York, and Reno colleges with a high proportion of underrepresented students were selected for the first TechWise cohort.
WE Scholarships were earlier awarded to 700 women who underwent a well-curated programme between 2019 and 2022 that included critical analytical skills, hands-on live projects, problem-solving skills and dedicated mentorship.
The programme in India has helped several WE alumni get internships and jobs in over 50 top multi-national companies, including Google, at compensation levels 1.5 times higher than the market median for entry-level engineers.