Shashi Dokania had spent nearly two years working as an accountant at Ernst & Young when she decided to exit the workforce in 2011 to raise her children. A few years later, her then-7-and-a-half-year-old son was attending a coding camp and needed Dokania’s help with Scratch coding (a programming language geared toward helping children learn to code). Dokania realized she had a passion for computer science and that she wanted to head back into the workforce—as a coder. She quickly signed up for Coursera and edEx classes and enrolled in a coding bootcamp of her own to learn the skills she’d need to make a career shift from accounting to software development. Dokania added her new skills to her resumé and LinkedIn profile, attended industry events, and started applying to dozens of technical roles.
A year later, Dokania was accepted into PayPal’s Recharge program, a 20-week paid training program for female technologists reentering the workforce after a career break, most commonly to focus on caregiving. In addition to sharpening their software development skills and networking with peers and higher-ups, the participants took soft skills classes on topics including networking, communication, and time management. At the end of the program, Dokania was hired as a full-stack engineer—someone who builds the content the user sees and the behind-the-scenes code that makes the tech work—and has since been promoted to senior engineering roles in which she uses the hard and soft skills she gained to manage and mentor other technologists.
