Sunita Joshi, a civil engineer from a well-known engineering college in Andhra Pradesh, is quite upbeat about joining a leading company in the construction and infrastructure space. She opted for a job in the infrastructure business dismissing lucrative offers from other sectors. So is the case with Pallavi Rao who will be taking up a project-based assignment soon with an infrastructure company. Sunita and Pallavi represent a growing crop of young and enterprising women foraying into the construction and infrastructure space once considered as male bastion.
Even in campus recruitments at various engineering colleges, girls with specialisation in civil engineering have shown willingness to take up their career with construction and infrastructure companies. They show interest in doing project-based assignments, which involves working at the site to push their career graph.
Says Maytas? group head (human resource) K Sheela Reddy, ?It is quite encouraging to see infrastructure and construction industry being considered as a preferred and desired industry on a par with other promising industries like the information technology and pharma. With India being on the fast track and infrastructure getting the necessary focus, there are a good number of career opportunities in the industry. Today, we are seeing a good lot of young girls and women willing to join the industry, earlier considered as a male dominated space. In fact, women are not shy to work even at the project site. For instance, at Maytas, we recruited 142 graduate engineering trainees (GET) in the last two months. Of that, 35% were female trainees. In the first phase of recruitment, 70% of female civil, mechanical and electrical engineers, who were short-listed, accepted the offers. While a relatively lower 62% of male engineers short-listed, accepted the offer.?
Indu Projects? HRD head V Pardhasaradhy also airs a similar view. ?When we went for campus recruitment, sometime we were surprised to find a lot of girls applying for jobs. We recruited 174 people and of that 50-60 were women. We also had discussions with them to understand their mindset when it comes to working at the site. Surprisingly, the girls never raised any concern over doing project-based assignments. The other thing we noticed during the recruitment exercise is that in most of the engineering colleges the first seven ranks are held by girls,?he said.