By supporting nonprofits that provide sustainable access to technology-enabled education, IT companies can drive innovation and create a brighter future for all. Organizations like Czechitas leverage education to empower women in tech, fostering innovation within companies. Today, Czechitas stands as the largest IT community in Czechia, committed to enhancing digital skills and advancing women in technology nationwide. In this episode, experts discuss how large enterprises can collaborate with nonprofits to bridge the technology gap for underrepresented communities. Featured experts Senta Čermáková, Governing Board Member and Director of International Operations, Czechitas Monoswita Saha, Director, Social Impact, Kyndryl
By supporting nonprofits that provide sustainable access to technology-enabled education, IT companies can drive innovation and create a brighter future for all. Organizations like Czechitas leverage education to empower women in tech, fostering innovation within companies. Today, Czechitas stands as the largest IT community in Czechia, committed to enhancing digital skills and advancing women in technology nationwide.
In this episode, experts discuss how large enterprises can collaborate with nonprofits to bridge the technology gap for underrepresented communities.
Featured experts
Senta Čermáková, Governing Board Member and Director of International Operations, Czechitas
Monoswita Saha, Director, Social Impact, Kyndryl
Tom Rourke 00:02
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of The Progress Report. My name is Tom Rourke. I'm Vice President for Design, Insights and Innovation at Kyndryl. As an organization, Kyndryl is very much committed to development goals around promoting inclusivity and sustainable economic growth, as well as providing quality education to the broadest possible communities. As you begin to explore the topic, you realize that, actually, beyond just merely committing to these goals, there's a very solid business case for these types of initiatives. The example we're going to talk about today in Czechia is a fantastic example of an investment in providing education, but also creating opportunity for the communities that surround them. I'm delighted to be joined today by Senta Čermáková, who is the CEO of Czechitas, and my colleague, Monoswita Saha, who is the Director of Social Impact here at Kyndryl. Let me begin with you, Senta, I've been fascinated by the story behind particularly your own journey in how you became involved with the initiative and how your career brought you to this particular moment.
Senta Čermáková 01:04
Yeah, thanks so much for this opportunity. I was born in Prague in an engineering family. Very ambitious. My childhood, like in a communist country, was very gray. But then finishing my technical university, somehow the market opened and myself, as a very ambitious person from the engineering family, I wanted to go big. I wanted to actually reach the American dream. So I started working for technological companies, and my career break came when I was 34-ish with two very young kids. And I was suddenly assigned to lead the merger of HP and Compaq on the Czech market. From this big project, I was suddenly in Silicon Valley working side by side with my fellow Americans. So basically, if I summarize, I have reached the peak of my career. And in that moment, I decided that I will return to my home country, back to the Czech Republic. I decided that my purpose is innovation, plus doing some social innovation. And this was the moment when I joined Czechitas, the fantastic NGO, as their CEO.
Tom Rourke 01:12
That's a fascinating journey, actually, and I think it probably does chime with the trajectory of the opportunity that IT obviously presents for everyone, but particularly maybe for women. So maybe you could tell me a little bit more about Czechitas and the mission that you fulfill in the Czech Republic.
Senta Čermáková 02:41
Czechitas has an amazing story. This is the organization, which was founded 11 years ago, to actually bring more women and girls to the tech functions and roles. And why it is so important for Czech Republic is because representation of women in IT in the Czech Republic. We would be one of the lowest representation countries, with 9% of IT experts being female talent. So why is this happening? Where is the opportunity? And here comes Czechitas and Kyndryl's story together. We can really achieve so many things together. We can open new domains for those talented, ambitious women. And we have decided, together with Kyndryl, that we will open two very important domains which are so much in demand on the current market, and they will be growing, and this is cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. I just think that those two domains are kind of crying for more girls and women, and together with Kyndryl, we can achieve so much.
Tom Rourke 03:07
Monoswita, maybe if you could talk a little bit about your experience to the Kyndryl Foundation, but also your work with Czechitas and your experience of working with them and the ambitions for that partnership.
Monoswita Saha 04:06
My journey, I'll go way back. I'm an immigrant. I was born in India. I left with my family when I was quite young. And I share this because I'm so lucky to have grown up in between countries with a blend of immigration experiences, and I had an amazing technicolor childhood through that. I also grew up seeing in very visceral ways that economic mobility, financial freedom, that's really the means to participate fully in society. And I share that because I just believe everyone deserves that path, and it's been a real inner compass for me throughout my career, and frankly, that's what's brought me to Kyndryl and to the Kyndryl Foundation. It's such a unique opportunity for a young company to launch a foundation only two years after becoming an independent company really, really focused on skilling, workforce development, and economic inclusion. And so, for me, it's just an amazing place to be. It's like a full circle moment from my childhood, and then this belief that I've had. And I have to say congratulations to Czechitas. You're actually now a multi-year partner, so we're going to be doing this together for a couple of years now. But what really caught our eye is that they really take a full spectrum approach, which is what I think something that Kyndryl does as well. And what I mean by full spectrum is, when we're talking about AI, cybersecurity, these tech fields, we assume that everyone else maybe knows what we're talking about. But that's not the case. The first step is really awareness. And we could see that this organization really looked at the spectrum from focusing on the first step, the awareness piece specifically focused around women, and then there's a continuum on skilling, training and placement. The persistence across all of those three stages is something that really attracted us to the organization, because I think we really felt a synergy that we shared similarities in mission and drive and perspective. So it's really been an amazing partnership so far.
Tom Rourke 06:13
So I actually have some personal background in working with a body that was involved actually in bringing people who were from significantly underprivileged backgrounds, where they hadn't had a long history of employment, into employment through IT skills. And the hypothesis was that actually, IT almost uniquely, and maybe the arts, can be quite egalitarian based on people's skills. You can rise based on skill. But having said that, it is still shocking to realize that there is a big gender gap here. And I'm just interested, what are those barriers? And how can we think about addressing them on a broader basis, not just in the Czech Republic?
Senta Čermáková 06:52
I think that there are maybe three different barriers. The first barrier is that if you are really in this kind of minority, you feel that this cybersecurity domain is not there for you. Traditionally, in Eastern Europe, those IT domains are always the domain of typically men. You will not be welcomed. You will not be having this kind of sense of belonging. Then we also go again to this kind of tradition on the Czech market, which is that we are enjoying a very long maternity leave, because our mothers, they typically stay three to four years with each kid, and they are fully subsidized with all those kind of social benefits and things like that. Which is good, sounds good, but it's not very practical into the domain, which is cybersecurity or AI, where everything is changing in the cosmic speed. And if you come four years later, you are basically starting from scratch, from zero. And then the third complication is that you are actually socially ostracized. If you, for example, tell to your mother, "Mom, I have a wonderful idea. Yeah, I will become a cybersecurity or AI expert." Your mom will tell you, "You must be crazy. Why are you not going into medicine or into law." So those women who are attracted to Czechitas, they are really super special, I would say super-women, who are actually going against social norms, who want to break the barriers, because they feel that if they go through this kind of big change of their career, they will not only make better lives for themselves, but for their families and for their kids. So they will actually change the life for others. And we are even having such kind of wonderful stories that, like the mother started with Czechitas, now her daughter goes with Czechitas and her girlfriends goes with Czechitas. So I think it's like a cascading effect, this kind of really welcoming, smart community.
Tom Rourke 09:25
There's obviously the purpose to this and the cause and how we change people's lives, but the economic business case is there too. That you're fundamentally transforming the opportunity for not just the individuals, but as you describe it, their families, and maybe through multiple generations, changing the expectations of opportunity that people have and so on. Monoswita, can you maybe just talk a little bit around the benefits in partnering with organizations like Czechitas, and the value that we derive from this? Because it may be framed somehow, sometimes as altruism, but it feels like it's way more than that. That there's a definite benefit to us in being part of these types of programs. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that.
Monoswita Saha 10:04
For Kyndryl, and I would argue for any organization, investing in a broad spectrum of talent is absolutely necessary to be future ready. I mean, we have the data. We know where the fastest growing industries are. We know where we have the fastest growing jobs, the fields that pay very, very well. And it's artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, it's tech fields. There's hard data essentially telling us that, given how quickly AI is moving and how increasingly relevant it is at the enterprise level, and on the day to day level, we actually need to increase our talent force, our professional skilled workforce, by 50% and we're not moving at that pace. When you look at cybersecurity, just given what we know of the needs and what we know of the existing talent, we know that we need to increase that talented labor force by about 75%. Again, we're not moving at the speed to actually achieve those pools and to close those gaps. So with that knowledge, it's not at all a surprise that if you talk to business leaders across industries, they will say that something that they think about deeply, as business leaders and in government and society, is specifically this skills gap. How do we bring in the skills and the right talent? How do we cultivate these in-house and externally to really meet the needs of the present and the future? So that's the business case, and it's a matter of, "Are we actually accessing these talent pools through the awareness, through the skilling, and through the partnerships, to train up these individuals so that they can come on the market and join the workforce and again, participate fully and really help everyone?" It is a business case, but ultimately, the more people we bring into these fields, the more people we help at large. Business and down to the individual level.
Tom Rourke 12:04
It's interesting. It sounds to me that for the people who come through Czechitas, there's actually a unique, extra special superpower, for want of a better phrase, that comes with those people in terms of the degree of motivation that they already have, if they've had to overcome a whole series of barriers to get there. And I think, Monoswita, you see that same cultural piece, but people from particular cultures and backgrounds where they have to overcome so many things to get to a point in their careers that that's already a demonstration of a strength that they have. Are there other particular strengths that women bring to either of those fields, in AI and cybersecurity? And I'm thinking maybe even in the AI one, because its origins are kind of very deeply techy. But I think as the technology evolves so quickly, the focus is more now shifting to the utility and the use cases, to how this is actually going to show up in the world. And I'm curious as to whether when you start looking at some of these fields, that actually there's an extra benefit that women bring a different perspective to the problem and to the problem solving. And is that another value that we need to think about?
Senta Čermáková 13:09
We have to realize that we are in the moment of political problems, if you will, and that those cyber attacks are getting more frequent and more complex. So we are also building the future where those talented experts could really serve in those positions, which could be maybe deployed into defense. This is such a kind of investment into our future and into our, I would say, peaceful future. And if you ask me where we see the talent, like women talent, we see that the best talents are actually at the intersections of IT and leadership, IT and project management, IT and change management, IT and process management, yeah? Because those ladies can really like change the world if they are having ability and freedom to really lead the most important digitalization projects.
Tom Rourke 14:23
Monoswita, I'm interested in if we are seeing similar initiatives more broadly in our work globally. Or, if not, what are the things that maybe even a Kyndryl can do to help seed those programs into other countries? Because clearly, there's a great benefit for us being involved. But what are we seeing elsewhere? Or is this something that is just uniquely Czech at the moment?
Monoswita Saha 14:45
Happily, I think it's not uniquely Czech. We could always have more, but we are seeing this more and more, and even on the Kyndry side. I mean, nearly 50% of our partners through the Kyndryl Foundation are focused on women's education, women's training, women's skilling and placement. And then even more broadly within our company and other social impact initiatives, we have a lot where we're really just focused on awareness, skilling and placement. So I'll give one example, Cyber Rakshak in India is an initiative where the goal is to train 100,000 rural women in cyber security. The objective is not necessarily to place them into cyber security careers. You know, these are women in their community and they sometimes have their own small businesses. The idea is for them to be able to protect their own small business and be cyber ambassadors within their communities. And we see huge socioeconomic value in that type of awareness and training, again, of just making sure that people understand, "What is this word? What is this field? How does it affect your day-to-day life?" And that's the starting point. And then it morphs into other things and into training, placements and things like that. We need to see more of just different types of training opportunities for different types of profiles and communities, because the traditional degree pathway is not always working in this field. And frankly, the traditional degree pathway is not accessible to everyone, so we're investing in those types of pathways, through Kyndryl and through the Foundation and other companies are as well. And that's personally what I'd love to see grow more and more because I think that's really what's needed, is having different pathways.
Tom Rourke 16:34
There's another dimension to this. I mean, we've been talking so far about the opportunities that are created for the individuals when they acquire those skills. But there is also the idea of those skills becoming available in the underserved communities, and I think, Monoswita, the example you gave of women looking to protect their businesses, because the reality is, and particularly driven by AI, cyber security threats are not just threats that threaten big banks and large enterprises. It's millions of micro attacks that can be ruinous to these small entities, businesses or even social organizations, right? So I think, you know, maybe just expand a little bit on that. I think that importance of not just the skills available to people like ourselves who need them for commercial purposes, but the idea of also then embedding those skills back into the communities that those people come from.
Monoswita Saha 17:21
This is also a cultural piece for Kyndryl where when we say that we are invested in communities where we live and work, we really mean invested in communities. And that's why I focused early on on the awareness piece of it, because we focus on the awareness piece, specifically on cybersecurity, because this is also where we hear the need. What you're talking about, Tom, these cyber attacks are absolutely ruinous. So, there's a national, I would say, drive at the country, regional, and local-to-national level to really get a handle on the cybersecurity piece. Because it's not just the employment piece, it's really the day-to-day life. This really touches every aspect of our beings, and if people don't understand what's happening, then they don't understand how to react to it. It's so widespread and yet the education, like the basic cyber-hygiene skills, are not really making it to the wider market. Even in our larger, I would say, social impact strategy, we really focus on the awareness piece even at a younger level. You know, we're talking a lot in this conversation about professionals maybe early career, mid-career, and the spectrum. But we also look at students. And as early as middle school, because, again, the awareness is so key. So we have now, for the past couple of years, a global partnership with United Way Worldwide. It started in Latin America, because the national priority there was really around STEM skilling at the school level onwards to really bolster that incoming pipeline. That's now grown to Japan and to Spain, and that early investment pays dividends.
Tom Rourke 19:09
Clearly, both of you are driven by a sense of purpose and have a great deal of passion for what you do. So I suspect progress is very important to both of you as you look forward having achieved so much in this field. What is the progress that you feel is still to be made? And if we were to have this conversation again three years from now or five years from now, what's the progress you would like to see us having made in that time?
Senta Čermáková 19:33
For me, it's pretty easy. I would like to see our Czechitas talent going to more and more decision-making roles. So we started 11 years ago and our ambition was to bring huge amount of girls and ladies into IT, and our intention now is to bring the right talent into the right decision-making professions. To see this change on the market, we need to now get support from the Czech government, because if we see eye to eye from the government to Czechitas, we will achieve like much more, and we are already building the bridges with the Kyndryl Foundation and Monoswita. And once we achieve this, we will see more and more fantastic Czechitas in the decision-making positions, because then A and B goes together, works together and Kyndryl will be, I would say, the trendsetter who kind of enabled this change.
Monoswita Saha 20:43
Progress to me is one day we look around the table and we don't need to ask who's missing. Everyone is there in the sense we already have a rich and varied array of experiences and backgrounds at the table and everything that that entails, in terms of the economic participation, the parity, all of those types of things. To drill it down, what can we do in the next three to five years to get to that vision? I think one thing is very much related to that mindset, which is how we think about this. So I think one thing that we can think about is less reliance on traditional degrees and more acceptance on skilling pathways, training pathways, micro-credentialing, and things like that. And I say that because those are the pathways that are more widely accessible and affordable to larger groups of people. So if we are able to mentally kind of shift in that sense, and really consider these different types of pathways, the skills, the perspectives and the backgrounds that they bring through, we will really start to expand those talent pools and bring those individuals into the field. So I'd say for me, in the next couple of years, again, it's that kind of mental shift around what we accept as that skilled person coming in, and that has a lot of ripple effect into how we offer trainings within companies, within organizations, and simply the profile of the candidates that we look at.
Tom Rourke 22:16
Senta, Monoswita, thank you so much for joining us today on The Progress Report. It's been a fascinating discussion. I am sure our listeners are going to enjoy every moment of it.
Senta Čermáková 22:24
Thanks so much. Tom, thanks for having me.
Monoswita Saha 22:27
It's the best hour I've spent in a long time. So, thank you.
Tom Rourke 22:34
It's always a joy to host The Progress Report, but there are days in which the conversation you would wish that we had way more time to explore some of the topics we only had an opportunity to touch on. I hope you feel the same way, and please do share the podcast with your friends and subscribe. Looking forward to the next episode of The Progress Report.