Coimbatore: Vidhya Manivel had been working as a software engineer with Cognizant Technology Solutions for five years when she was forced to take a break. She took a break when her daughter turned one because she found it difficult to manage an infant with her work schedule. “I was unable to juggle managing a household, an infant, and my job,”.
Five years later, when her daughter had turned six, she rebooted her career, joining Kovai.co in March 2020 as a Senior Support Engineer with Document360. It was triggered by her daily routine becoming too monotonous. “I realized that my schedule revolved around household chores and that was the only thing my daughter saw me doing,” she says. “I also realized I was wasting five years of work experience, an under-graduate and post-graduate degree,”.
The return to work was not easy, but surprisingly smooth, she says. “In CTS I was working with one specific technology which had become redundant. CTS had stopped using it and no other company was using it either,” says Vidhya. She learned the ins and outs of Document360 from scratch. She took a trial of the product and had a knowledge transfer for a week to start understanding and learning about it.
Vidhya says she ended up finding her work easy and owes her success in settling down to her then manager, Gowri Ramkumar. “My manager was extremely supportive in helping me learn the product and settle down into the job too,” she says. “Soon I found myself successfully onboarding new customers and handling their queries too,”.
She said the fact that she started on the job just as the lockdown began had its advantages. “Since it was working from home my daughter was not missing me. And we stayed in a joint family set up during the first lockdown, so we could all pitch in to entertain and keep an eye on her,” she adds.
And in February 2022, after schools started and Vidhya began working from the office, things fell into place automatically. “I got flexible work timings, so this lets me drop and pick my daughter from school and spend time with her,” she says. “I don’t miss out on my daughter growing up,”.