Saumya Shah started working for Avanade in January 2021 after working for an international company in digital services and consulting. In a short period of time, she followed multiple courses that benefited her career at Avanade. Next to the mandatory Microsoft courses, she participated in our course ‘Realize Your Potential’ for female consultants.

At Avanade we believe in limitless learning and all the benefits that come with it. Some courses are mandatory, and others are free to choose. All are valuable for someone's career, personal and professional development and skill set. Avanade empowers limitless and continuous learning throughout the company.

Seeing potential

In the last two years, Saumya invested her time and effort in gaining knowledge and expertise. She works as a Cloud Consultant within Avanade and for this position you need to follow mandatory courses and training to stay up to date about the technologies and their potential. Limitless learning is one of the employee value propositions of Avanade and that is why we offer a broad spectrum of courses that deals with not only technical skills but also people skills. Saumya chose the Realize Your Potential course, especially designed for female consultants: “In just a short period of time, I learned a lot about the support and helpfulness of the people within the company. That is one way of learning new skills and gaining experience and expertise. I was also introduced to the high number of courses you can follow internally. The Realize Your Potential course stood out to me because of the focus on female consultants. There are only a few exclusive programs like these”

About the course

Realize Your Potential is a program that reaches women across the organization. It provides support, guidance, mentoring and solutions to barriers women may face in the workplace and much more. It is a six-month program dedicated to female consultants all over the world: “I am proud to be a part of this network of women. We can engage with each other as well as share experiences and knowledge among the group. The program is an effective way of nurturing women through their careers and into leadership positions. I learnt a lot about my own personality type and how every individual is different in way of thinking and working. That was an eye opener. There were many workshops that helped me develop soft skills and realize my true potential. I talked to my career advisor about this course and was able to join the six-month program. First, I had to take a personality test of about 140 questions and then was placed in a group with 4 other female colleagues from around the world. Together, we followed workshops on the potential of your current position and how you can grow professionally and personally. This took place after office hours, every week or two weeks. We needed to complete an assignment and think of a user case within a specific domain like finance, health care, non-profit, etc. We choose Avanade as the potential client.”

Working together

Our group focused on waste management for Avanade: how we are able to manage the waste we generate as a company and make it beneficial. Next on the list was to create a presentation and work on the solution. We spend as much time as possible on a presentation for the jury and other groups. We thought that instead of re-inventing the wheel why not make use of the available Microsoft technologies and made an estimated budget. I really liked working together with international colleagues with different personalities and the support we received from our mentor during the course. Participating in a course is a good way of meeting new people and sharing experiences. The journey is even more important than the result, because working together is a challenge in itself. We presented our presentation, and it was received well by the jury. Their feedback was to invest time and effort in the solution whenever we can after the course is finished. It was an amazing opportunity and I now understand other people more, based on their personality and motives.”

Look at our career pages to find out more about working at Avanade.