Many Mouths to Feed and No Job

When Beena’s father passed away in 2016, the same year her mother retired, Beena stepped into the role of family breadwinner and caregiver. Her job alone paid their rent and all expenses. In addition, Beena took on the responsibility to marry her sister, who remained in the household and went on to have two children. Beena became financially responsible for her nephews as well. 

Beena was a commerce graduate with nearly two decades of experience. Then in the pandemic, the company she had worked for for over seven years got shut down. “That’s when I was out of a job.” The job market was unforgiving. “Companies were shutting down and people were moving out of the cities,” she explained. Over two and a half years, she sent hundreds of applications with no results. 

Beena made the difficult choice not to share her change in employment status with her family, to avoid causing a panic. Both her sister and mother were struggling with different medical conditions, and she didn’t want the stress of her situation to further impact them. During that time, her mother was diagnosed with a serious illness and her sister had a very high-risk, complicated pregnancy. So, she carried the burden of their impending insolvency on her own. Meanwhile, her savings were dwindling, not just because of the normal household expenses she carried, but because of her family’s increased medical bills as well. 

While sending one dead-end application after another, Beena worried as she watched her bank account diminish. “If [my savings] finishes, what am I going to do? How am I going to support my family? I was out of options and out of hope.”

A Perfect Candidate for Upskilling to the Cloud

Beena was savvy and saw that cloud computing was booming, even as other jobs were being lost. She wanted to upskill, and give cloud a try, but she feared that without a technical or STEM background, she would be a poor candidate for this thriving market. A paid certification was out of the question, since she was now running the household on fumes and prayers. 

That’s when she found Generation’s AWS Cloud program. “I was physically drained, mentally exhausted, and did not have any options. When I didn’t know what to do, where to go, Generation happened at that moment,” she shared. “It was a ray of hope for me.” 

The program provided everything she’d need: two and a half months of online technical training, the certification, plus the communication, presentation, and interview skills she needed after two years out of the workforce. And the best part was that it was free of cost. “Once you’re out of the program, you’re job ready.” 

A Call That Changed Her Life

Capgemini, one of the companies in Generation’s employer partner network, had gotten Beena’s CV from Generation. One night she got a call from them inviting her to an interview. 

In November 2022, Beena joined as a pre-sales technical consultant, where she has remained in a stable post for the last few years. The job came just in the nick of time, enabling Beena to continue supporting her growing family. “Now, with this job, I have financial security after two and a half years of searching. I know for sure, at the end of the month, I will get something in my bank account.”

Beena continues to support the family, now with a sense of ease and stability, having found her place in a thriving industry. She has peace of mind that even as challenges come, she can handle them, and take care of the household. For example, her mother’s recent operation was covered entirely by her employer’s insurance. 

Beena never wanted to be dependent on anyone, least of all a husband. So despite family pressure during her period of unemployment, and while her sister’s family was growing, Beena did not marry. When we spoke to her, she made it clear that she waited to marry until she had a job, and could pay a share of her own wedding expenses, so her mother wouldn’t have to. When Beena got settled at Capgemini, only then did she agree to marry an old friend, who she had known for many years. 

She and her husband now have a son, and she took six months of maternity leave and six more working from home, all thanks to her position. “Having a kid, that’s the best part of my life, and being independent and financially secure.”

“If you are independent, if you’re financially secure, you can conquer anything in the world. Nobody will question you. This is something which happened completely free of cost at the right moment in my life. Everything happened because of Generation.”