MakeMyTrip brings back women techies into workplace with ‘BackToFuture’ programme

The programme will provide opportunities to talented women, who are ready to return from a break, to reboot their careers in full force.

In an endeavour to bring back women tech talent, who have been on a break, back into the workplace, MakeMyTrip has announced a unique programme—‘BackToFuture’. Specially designed for those talented women who are ready to return, after enjoying a break in their careers, the BackToFuture programme will provide them opportunities to restart their careers in full force.

Focussing on getting back women who had opted for a pause of one to two years in their careers, the 24-week long paid internship programme will offer structured onboarding, focussed mentoring and on-the-job learning to help the individual’s quick ramp-up at work.

Whether it leads to a full-time career or serves to sharpen the skills necessary to take the next step, this is a valuable prospect for anyone ready to re-enter the workforce. The purpose of the programme largely is to help returning women start their careers again and facilitate diversity and women leadership in future.

“This program is the brain child of two of the mothers in MMT, Aliya and Dheerja, who related with the need of getting high quality of tech talent available amongst women on a career break, back to workplace. I believe this initiative if adopted across the Industry will bring in huge fillip to the increase in the women tech force.”

Yuvaraj Srivastava

Yuvaraj Srivastava, group CHRO, MakeMyTrip, says, “This programme is the brainchild of two of the mothers in MMT—Aliya and Dheerja—who related with the need to get high-quality tech talent from amongst women on a career break, back to the workplace. I believe this initiative, if adopted across the Industry, will give a huge fillip to the number of women in the tech force.”

The programme, scheduled to be rolled out in the first week of May, will address two batches every year, targeting 20–25 women in each batch. Each woman will undergo structured onboarding, focussed mentoring and on-the-job learning during the six-month tenure.

At the end of the programme, whether it unfolds into a full-time opportunity for the women, or helps boost their employment opportunity, the aim is to get women back to work. It is to facilitate the building of talent diversity at the workplace, as it will help build career resilience for experienced and skilled women, who attrite owing to the social role expectations of being women.

In line with that, Sanjay Mohan, group CTO, MakeMyTrip says, “Through the BackToFuture programme, we intend to remove all obstacles in the way of getting the highly-skilled women workforce back into the mainstream.”

He explains how women, who choose to take a few years off to attend to home and children, slowly lose touch with the technology innovations and after a while, their skills get out of sync with the existing market demands.

“However, those who have a strong foundation can always come back stronger with a little bit of support from our side, and that’s what we want to capitalise on. Our hope is that this BackToFuture stream will get a lot of solid technical talent back into the mainstream and help both the industry and the women techies who avail of this programme,” he adds.