Avanti Sharma is the Head of Business Development at Workshop4Me, and the Brand Ambassador for Girls in Tech Luxembourg.
Please introduce yourself to our AMCHAM Newsletter readership so they better understand who you are, what you have been doing and the focus of your professional life experience.
I’m the Head of Business Development at Workshop4Me, and the Brand Ambassador for Girls in Tech Luxembourg, both of which are non-profit organizations working towards empowering young people with coding and technology skills. At Workshop4Me, I’ve ideated and launched Codeutainment™, a first-of-its-kind concept where science and technology are presented in such an entertaining manner as to stimulate the experience of watching a thrilling movie. The event takes place at Kinepolis Kirchberg. Together with Girls in Tech, I’ve created awareness about the gender disparity in the technology industry at international conferences, recently at the Women in Tech Global Summit 2024.
What are the values that inspire you and you hold close which serve to guide your decision making?
The most important value for the team and myself is; Do the right thing.
This has been the motto for many years, and is always applied when making a decision. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the blur of being overwhelmed with the trend or common opinion, but this motto reflects keeping the long-term goal in mind.
Have your values changed over the past three years and, if so, in what ways… and why?
(answered as part of previous question, in essence: The motto has remained the same; Do the right thing.)
What role have your parents played contributing to your success?
My parents and brother have played an important role contributing to where I stand today. From gaining opportunity and giving me exposure to tech events from a young age, they have always been quite supportive of the path.
One of the first opportunities was attending the LIFT2016 conference in Geneva, where my brother delivered his keynote on the power of science and technology. LIFT was a grand event, and it was my first time being a part of something of the caliber. The conference motivated me to learn more about technology and play a role.
Please share your assessment of the relative equality of opportunity and access you see and experience with regards to men and women?
The situation in equality between men and women has drastically improved over the past 10 years, and women are now treated the best they have been in history. However, there is still a long way to go. The biggest challenge in addressing this issue is aligning global value systems such that women are regarded with the same mental capability as their male counterparts. This challenge can best be solved through education and creating awareness in both men and women, to break the current cycle of passing down inherent biases about capabilities to the next generation.
Why have you chosen Tech as a professional area of interest and what is your satisfaction with the professional and career situation in this field of activities?
Tech has interested me from a young age, when I found out how creative coding can be. see tech as the future, and believe that everyone has a role to play in shaping it. The tech industry is rapidly growing and evolving space, and will only continue to do so. With this lens, a professional career in tech can be quite rewarding, especially in terms of growth opportunity. Regardless of which career path one chooses, technology will only continue to be increasingly involved in the process. Therefore, I urge all individuals to have a basic understanding of the principles behind how their tech tools work.
Where do you hope to see yourself positioned in five years?
In the next five years, I plan to take forward the initiative I have already started working on, global. Notably, two software projects I have developed to keep teenagers safe online, and on social media. My goal is to create a safer online experience for teenagers, with a focus on girls.
Do you mentor other young people and what do you tell them?
As a coach at Workshop4Me, an organization shaping younger generations to become the problem-solvers of the future through programming and technology skills, I also mentor young people. I like to encourage them to look past just getting their program to work, but rather focus on how it works, and to develop a deeper sense of understanding.
This is often not what they’re used to doing at school through memorization of concepts before a test, and therefore shifts the way they approach solving a problem.
What are the 5 most important current professional challenges?
- Merging sustainability with productivity within an organization – although this remains a challenge, it’s also a huge opportunity to drive new ideas and solutions.
- Disconnect between learning and application – often a challenge faced due to the design of current education systems
- Fear of technology – mostly induced by dramatic headlines about upcoming technologies
- Online protection – notably for organizations, but also for employees who handle the company’s sensitive data
- Derailment of gender apprehension – an increasing issue due to misunderstanding of the purpose of gender equality
As a successful young woman leader, please share your feelings, personal experience and hopes for what you think your professional career and life progression will be
Feelings:
My feelings are shaped by the queries and questions I get from my students or audience in various conferences, events, and workshops. Be it at the Women In Tech Global Conference; Mobile World Congress, running workshops for the European Commission or running EIB sponsored digital classes for underprivileged students in India. In each of these instances, I see the keenness in the eyes of the students or the audience of different age groups to learn something. This keeps re-inforcing the feeling in me that I should stay a lifelong student. The desire to keep learning and applying those learnings, should always define me. This is the primary attribute that should define me.
Personal Experiences:
My personal experiences are shaped by the energy and trust of those who expressed their belief in me and put me on high platforms at a very young age. There have been many. The most dedicated of them have been Simona Barbieri of HubDot; Ayumi Moore Aoki of Women In Tech and Fernando de Azevedo; David Savage of NashSquared; Kamel Amroune of The Dots; Gillian Tans of Booking.com; Randi Zuckerburg of Zuckerberg Media and formerly the Communications Head of Facebook; Gil Rosen of Amdocs; Vasiliki Mouchou and Patricia Souza of Girls in Tech Luxembourg and Carlo Hansen of Foundation Jeunes Scientifiques. At the ministerial level, Elisabeth Margue and Yuriko Backes have been quite supportive of me.
Each of them personally invested their time and efforts in my success and showed me that indeed “You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains. I am strong, when I am on your shoulders. You raise me up to more than I can be”. I have received tremendous support from the Government of Luxembourg and leading corporates be it Orange, Deloitte, KPMG, EY, PwC.
Looking forward, I shall soon be in Porto for the Women in Tech Porto Summit where Cindy Barado and her team is going to welcome me as a keynote speaker. This is really kind. It tells iGens that the world is not as stiff and critical of younger generations as it used to be 20 years ago. I would like to spread this message wider.
Professional career:
I would like to make my professional career around the periodic table – covering rare minerals, energy production, quantum computing, space exploration, and of course coding.
Life progression:
I would like to see my life progressing as an entrepreneur being part of a unicorn from early 30s onwards while in parallel continuing to do something for those who carry the keenness to learn and give back their time for the improvement of society and the community they live in.
Do you think the young women and men of your generation have reached a point of equal access and treatment or are there other things you would like to see changed
iGens and younger generations have definitely made progress in the fight towards more equal access and treatment for all, moving forward from previous generations. From an iGens perspective, there are less boundaries about what one should be.
However, work still needs to be done to bridge the gap between men and women in STEM industries. Even though the mental barrier is broken, we must now work on making it more natural in practice.