TalentSprint Expands Women Engineers Programme with Google Support

Hyderabad-headquartered TalentSprint, which brings high-end, deep-tech education to young and experienced professionals, has now expanded its Women Engineers (WE) Programme with enhanced support from Google. This, in turn, means that building on the strong industry acceptance of the first cohort, the second cohort will select, train, and enable as many as 120 talented women engineering students to become world-class software engineers. The programme is open to first-year women students in the engineering stream across India.

While women were pioneers in the early decades of programming, the participation of women in the global technology sector today stands at 26% (per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics). The WE program, offered by TalentSprint with support from Google, addresses this gender imbalance by grooming talented young women engineering students to advance and contribute to the field. Prioritising inclusion, the program places a special focus on mentoring gifted women engineers from underprivileged and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The first cohort of 100 WE students, shortlisted and selected from a pool of 7200+ applicants, began their intensive training and mentoring sessions in June 2019, and have received a very encouraging response from the tech industry. Well before the completion of the program, WE students received 104 internships and full time offers from 54 companies, at compensation levels 86% above the market average as per Glassdoor.

Encouraged by the success of the first cohort, TalentSprint, supported by Google, is announcing the second WE cohort of 120 students to begin their training and mentoring programme in March 2020. This year’s WE format, which aims at creating a similar cohort of women students, is at present, completing their first year of engineering studies. The same experiment has now been expanded to include coding boot camps, online classes, full scholarships, stipends, mentoring by Google engineers, hackathons, and projects over the next two years.

Speaking on the roll-out of the new second cohort, Anand Rangarajan, Engineering Director at Google India, said that the inclusion of women at every stage of the process aims at creating universally relevant technology products. But that process is critical and they are committed to facilitating gender and socioeconomic diversity among software engineers worldwide. The company feels greatly encouraged by the enthusiastic acceptance of the first cohort of talent mentored under this programme and also by the opportunity to drive more gender equality within the tech ecosystem. They are excited to support TalentSprint in this initiative, who have done exceptional work in the area, he said.

Santanu Paul, co-founder and CEO of TalentSprint, said that there is no doubt whatsoever that if right guidance, right environment, and the right support can be offered, young women from non-elite colleges can compete head-to-head with the best software engineers in the world. And the success of the first WE cohort bears testimony to that fact. With the increased support from Google and an expanded programme format, they are fully committed to producing a large pool of gifted women engineers who will shape the next wave of global technology development, he said.