Team Spotlight: Kavita Rao Bawankar

Relaunched twice with more energy, maturity and experience!

Being a relauncher, not once but twice epitomizes myself to carry on iRelaunch’s mission of “Normalizing Career Breaks” forward. I am delighted and grateful to iRelaunch for giving me the opportunity to ‘Walk the Talk’. Being in the shoes of a relauncher and facing all the initial inhibitions, challenges and imposter syndrome myself, I am able to empathize more with each relauncher during my interactions.

Yes, you read it right! Two breaks in a Corporate Human Resources career comes with its own baggage of goodness and bitterness but with a more matured perspective. I took my first break as a trailing military spouse - marrying a person serving in the Indian Army. According to the posting, I landed in distant North-Eastern India. With very limited resources and means, I decided to utilize the lean period and completed my Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration. After re-entering the workforce and working in the Human Resource department for almost 10 years in various functions like recruitment, background verification, shared services, learning and development and getting exposure to some well-known multinational companies for 10 years, I went on my second career break for my own well -being and childcare. From the bottom of my heart I knew this was a ‘Pause’ and not a ‘Full stop’ to my career although there was a great resistance from my Seniors to do so. Well, this break was more interesting as I started my entrepreneurship journey to keep myself creatively occupied and learn new skills. I became a professional Chandler. Well in both the breaks I was determined to come back with the time. It helped me in grooming myself to be a better person in terms of experience, confidence, maturity and multi-dimensional skills starting from designing my own social page to getting my start up registered, studying market, analyzing, creating, packaging, marketing and sales etc. Phew! A whole lot of learning in a short period of time and the knowledge remains forever with you.

Eventually I decided to get back to work-landed up being interviewed and selected for iRelaunch; thereby launching my own journey of relaunch. At iRelaunch I program manage client’s returnship programs and various interactions for consulting engagements. I also contribute to Talent search initiatives and other India operations. These activities help me to challenge myself and learn something new every day. It’s interesting to hear relauncher stories full of warmth and gratitude during coaching sessions and that’s how with each passing day I reinforce my belief in “Power of Women and Power of iRelaunch”.

My key learnings for all-

• Create your ecosystem to relaunch-Assign tasks which can be offloaded to someone and empower even family members to contribute in terms of house help, daily chores, groceries etc.

I was lucky enough to get that support from my husband and daughter.

• Always build and sustain your network -mentors, supervisors, co -workers. Your mentor can guide and drive you to look out for “The Job”, you have always been looking for.

• Never shy away from taking “That Step” which you are doubtful of, which may be the key turner for your dream job. TRY- after all there is nothing to lose out on.

• Don’t lose patience, keep calm and go on.

So that was all about my relaunching journey. I am based out of a beautiful city of Pune which is known as “Oxford of East” and is an important hub of the IT industry in India. In my free time-I like to bake and for holidays, I love to travel and explore places on unplanned road trips.

With this, I would like to convey my best wishes to everyone - especially to each relauncher who is reading the note and looking to start their journey back to the workforce.

Wishing you all good health and greatness!

Happy Relaunching!