How Deutsche Bank is helping senior women employees retain their tech skills

While focus on diverse hiring in India has picked up significantly in India as of late, there are still certain gaps that have been ascertained by companies. German multinational investment bank and financial services company, Deutsche Bank has identified that the women’s talent pool is underrepresented in the higher ranks in the tech domain.

Suchishree Chatterjee, head of India technology centre & CIO, RFT global data ingestion, Deutsche Bank, tells HRKatha, “We see a reasonably healthy intake of women graduates at entry level, but as one goes up the hierarchy within technology jobs in India, the gender gap widens considerably.”

In a bid to mitigate this gap, the Bank has launched an initiative called the DB Tech Accelerator. With this programme, DB aims to help women retain their coding skills at more senior levels as they have moved into less technical roles, such as business analysts, quality assurance specialists, and so on.

The DB Tech Accelerator is job-oriented training, which helps participants move to an engineering-led career path, even if they don’t have any prior experience in coding. It is an intensive, 12-week, full-time training, which meant that participants stepped aside from their day jobs to participate in the programme.

“External specialists trained our participants on full-stack development, giving them a well-rounded overview of client, as well as server side technologies, with practical coding experience following each new concept,” Chatterjee elaborates.

“We see a reasonably healthy intake of women graduates at entry level, but as one goes up the hierarchy within technology jobs in India, the gender gap widens considerably”

Suchishree Chatterjee, head of India technology centre & CIO, RFT global data ingestion, Deutsche Bank

With this programme, participants have access to recordings of the training sessions and have coaches available for support. They are also inducted as part of the alumni network comprising graduates of previous sessions and will regularly receive training material to enhance their knowledge.

The Bank has already run two cycles of this programme in London and will soon run it for their workforce in Bucharest and Germany. For the pilot of the programme in India, Deutsche invited women at mid-career level (assistant vice president and vice president) to apply for the programme.

The number of participants was restricted to 12, to allow for more focused attention and a better learning experience for all, Chatterjee shared, adding, “The interest and enthusiasm to join the programme, however, was much higher. We received almost three times the number of applications, as compared to the number of seats available. It is also interesting to note that two of the women participants had no prior coding experience and none of them were working in technical roles at the time of their application.”

The first batch has already been trained under the various tech disciplines as of now and the company reveals that the results have been great. All 12 women who were part of the programme have now been given roles that involve coding. “We now look forward to these women making full use of these new skills to develop existing technical solutions for our Bank and clients,” Chatterjee says.

“Through this programme, we not only want to give women the chance to develop their careers but also build a strong pipeline of women at senior levels in our technology teams. This is just one of the initiatives that we run to narrow the diversity gap,” concludes Chatterjee.