Big Tech Isn’t the Only Way

This section is taken from our podcast, B The Way Forward, featuring our President and CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson and AnitaB.org Board Member Trishala Pillai. In this episode, Trishala shares her journey as many things, like Senior Product Manager of Supply Chain Innovation at Walmart, and Producer at her own media company, Jugaad Community. For the full conversation, check out the link below!

This is like a controversial opinion, but you know, I like to be bold with what I say and don't want to hold back here.

So I think one thing I've noticed, and this is by no means like a company opinion or I'm not representing any of the companies I've worked with, but what I've noticed over the past several years in building my career is that as technologists, we tend to swarm towards big tech, right? We think that is tech.

Then we're competing, or we only consider ourselves as being, being worthy of entering tech, if we can fill in those, the sort of stereotypical roles in our mind, right?

Coder, software developer, we have a narrow definition of what tech means, and so what I've noticed is, you know, when you have fields like supply chain, and tech is now a part of every industry, and you can apply it to any kind of problem, really, the kind of folks that I've studied with in, in my master's program or in some of the schools that I've been a part of, we don't even consider supply chain as a place where we could work and we don't even find it easy to recruit those kind of people who are graduating from your top business schools because they have a really often, not everyone, but often a lot of us have a constrained sort of definite, a narrow definition of tech.

So I bring this up because I think it's so important as we're having a chat on sort of careers and building your career to open up your definition for success. And just because majority of the folks you know, are swarming towards one direction and trying to work with a specific type of company and on a specific type of problem, it doesn't mean that it starts and ends there.

I think there's a world of other opportunities, some of which I'm not even exposed to yet that we should consider applying those skills to as well, and I'm sure we'll find success there.

Listen to the full conversation here: Apple Podcasts, Spotify