Career breaks, whether it’s for maternity or caregiving, is pretty common among women—and yet, it hinders their growth trajectory in the workplace. Recognising this as a problem that creates more obstacles for women, many global companies are now trying to help women on a career break get more skills so that they can rejoin the workforce. VMware, the enterprise software company, has just announced its collaboration with Intel in India to provide women software developers, a chance to restart their careers after taking a break.
Under this joint initiative by the two companies’ upskilling programmes, VMware’s VMinclusion Taara and Intel’s Home To Office (H2O), will offer women a wide range of free courses so that they feel empowered to return to work with updated skills and more career opportunities in hand. VMinclusion Taara, which was launched in 2019, will offer 15,000 women free technical education and certification courses in the fields of cloud management, automation, data centre virtualisation, networking and digital workspaces. The H2O courses, first launched in 2017, will focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), time series analysis, DL for robotics, and anomaly detection.
In addition, VMware’s Spring courses will also provide the women with experience in auto-configuration, testing frameworks, creating enterprise and cloud-ready applications. "We are excited about this collaboration with Intel as we come together to empower more women developers in India to return to work successfully. Our aim is to help bring back talented women developers to the industry by upskilling them with the right resources," said Duncan Hewett, senior vice president and GM of VMware, in the statement.
"Globally, by 2030, we aim to increase the number of women in technical roles at Intel to 40 per cent, and we remain committed to investing in social equity programmes and initiatives that advance our inclusion goals. We believe that shaping the skills of women technologists, who make up a critical workforce, is imperative to drive greater innovation and growth for the industry," said Nivruti Rai, Intel India’s country head and vice president of Intel Foundry Services.