Shilpi Jain, Head – Operations, Ajashy Engineering Sales
This shy lady from Rishikesh, Uttarakhand, has an affinity towards Physics. She is highly professional and balances her ambitious career by managing to keep her family as her top priority. She can be called a one-woman army who can help grow a company almost single-handedly. Sarada Vishnubhatla meets her over coffee and gets to know her better.
Born in 1976, Shilpi Jain grew up in a family where her father and elder sister hold degrees in Physics. It was natural for her to pursue a post-graduate degree in the same subject.
Climbing the career ladder, Shilpi has worked across different sectors including IT, besides helming her own ventures a few times. The high point came in her career when she landed a job with high-security aerospace domain in the US as a software performance tester.
She shares: “At the time of my joining, the virtual user script was not running successfully and I had to ensure that it ran without breaking from end-to-end and code is added. The main advantage of working there was learning to work at a massive scale along with a full team of manual testers, functional and non-functional testers.”
Juggling between taking care of her two small daughters in the US especially with her husband having come back to India, Shilpi did face a few moments that made her question her decision to continue with a high-pressure job.
“Most of the time, I can handle both work stress and take care of my family. But there was this one time when my younger daughter, who was a little over 2-year-old then, decided that she would not budge till her father showed up. I needed to be in the office by 9 that day and I had to drop her off at the pre-school before that. No amount of cajoling and bribing her treats helped. I was frantic and she cried all the way to school. The next morning what we see… my husband is at the door. And to think that this was not the only time it happened. Over time, he did that a couple of more times,” she shares reminiscing.
Delineating the heart and the head at work is tough especially when one faces such situations in the family. She agrees: “I tend to balance my emotions at work. Also, I have made it clear at work that the team can talk to me about anything but they know that I am a stickler for professionalism. My team knows if need be, I can take even unpopular decisions.”
Joining the 7-year-old Ajashy Engineering has helped her feel content, for a couple of reasons: “One, I missed using my studies for the last 25-30 years because after my PG I have worked mainly in IT companies. Here, I am able to utilize my engineering expertise. Two, Ajashy requires me to put on multiple hats. All hands are on the deck here. I am happy.”
Though she is the only woman executive at Ajashy, she is accepted as an equal for her talent.