In her career of 17 years, Disha Ballal took three breaks. The first time was after she got married, following a stint with Wipro, and she used that time to do an MBA from IBS Hyderabad. The second was a maternity break.
And most recently again, between 2019 and 2021. Each time, returning to the workforce wasn’t a big deal, because, as she says, she kept learning. Immediately after her MBA, she did a scrum master’s certificate course from Scrum Alliance.
In 2018, she got a certificate from the Project Management Institute (PMI), which gave interviewers the confidence that she could take on senior roles. “It is important to invest in learning in a way that you stay ahead of the curve. I got certified as a scrum master even before the word agile became fashionable.
Companies had just begun moving from the waterfall mechanism to agile culture when I got certified,” she says. Studying for the PMI certification was extra work, since she had a family by then, but that was the only way she could think of to sustain herself in the tech world. With all this to her credit, when Disha started applying for jobs in 2021, after being a full-time mother for a while, she got five job offers.
All were in her domain of project management. Four offers were through the regular channel, and one offer by Publicis Sapient was through a career comeback programme. Publicis Sapient offered her a fair pay package, and work from home option.
This made it so attractive that she took it up. Disha .
