AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 - Diversity Program
AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 experience by Bhuvaneswari Subramani
AWS Community Day Bengaluru 2019 is happy and proud to host the first ever diversity program as part of the AWS Community Day across the globe.
Wonderful audience, best speakers across the globe and great topics to enlighten, I was pretty excited about the event!
We had two super women to talk at Diversity Program, Diana Cruz Solash from Infor & Shwetha Lakshman Rao from Women Who Code Bengaluru & VMware.
Diana joined Infor last year in the newly created role of VP, Inclusion and Diversity. She works closely with senior leaders and the entire Infor Team to ensure we fully recognize, value, and leverage the diversity each person brings to Infor. Prior to Infor, Diana had a highly successful 20+ year career at EY, where she held the title of Director, Global and Americas Diversity & Inclusiveness. Diana an avid runner, have completed five marathons.
We were indeed honoured to have such an inspiring lady to address the Diversity Program.
Diana spoke about Practical tactics for achieving full potential in your career where she emphasised on 4 key practices to ignite one's career -
- Master your Craft
- Bring a point of view
- Seek out "gold standard" feedback
- Build your personal board of directors
No wonder this was applauded by audience as the best non-technical talk.
I also had a fire side chat with Diana to understand few more aspects of "Inclusion & Diversity" and her experience where Diana explained the following
- how corporates support its employees by putting these practices into place
- What does Inclusion & Diversity mean globally and locally?
- The best transformation Diana have seen in a person based on the “gold standard” she has feedback given?
- She also shared her personal experience of how having personal board of directors have made a difference, which otherwise would have been very normal.
We would like to extend our hearty wishes to Diana in her mission to create an inclusive culture which opens doors and unlocks potential for each person at Infor to enable better business results.
Our next speaker in the Diversity Program was Shwetha, Sr MTS at VMware Software India and city Director at Women Who Code Bangalore. She holds a patent on High availability from the US Patent Office. Shwetha is a tech enthusiast as well as a motivational speaker, presented her papers in national / international conferences on technologies like IoT, Blockchain, Cloud and currently pursuing Post Graduate in Machine Learning. Her passion towards technology and empowering women to grow in technical ladder is amazing.
Shwetha addressed the audience on Exploring opportunities with communities for a successful career, extended invite to be part of WomenWhoCode, Bengaluru and also introduced VMInclusion Taara initiative (from VMware in collaboration with women who code) to the audience. She had lot of take-aways on how to enable more women to become tech-savys through communities.
On the whole, the Diversity Program was a huge success with inspiring and insightful presentations.
Special thanks to Infor & Diana for sponsoring goodie to all the diversity program attendees.
Thanks to Rashmi Sreedharan, for her involvement and support all through planning & execution.
Kudos to the organisers Jeevan Dongre, Sathyajith Bhat, Runcy Oommen and Prashanth HN for standing by!
