Jui Shrikant Bidaye’s journey into technology began with a passion for online games. Her curiosity wasn’t just about playing them; she was driven by a desire to understand how they worked. This curiosity led her to explore the fundamentals of Java and Python. Her parents, a farmer and a homemaker in the small rural town of Devgad in the Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, saw their daughter’s potential and encouraged her to channel that curiosity. After graduating high school, she moved over 200 miles to Pune to pursue a bachelor’s in information technology at NBN Sinhgad School of Engineering.
The university’s training and placement officer suggested she participate in TechSaksham. The program equipped her with essential skills in Java, Python, and C programming, while also focusing on communication skills through mock interviews and group discussions. “Java was a key thing that the program taught me—it built the foundation for my coding career,” she recalls. The program also offered her a pathway to her first professional experience: a six-month internship at Genpact as a full-stack developer. She credits her placement to the program’s training, which included mock interviews and group discussions to build communication skills.
At Genpact, she drew on concepts from the program such as how to create application program interfaces (APIs) and included security features like requiring admin approval to add users and creating different interfaces so users could not see what others were doing. She also used AI tools like Microsoft Copilot, which she was introduced to through the program. After her internship, Jui briefly worked at Zensar Technologies, where she had the opportunity to work on an AI-based project, contributing to data preparation and model development for a driverless vehicle system. But her goal was always clear: “Microsoft is my dream company from third year,” she states. While scrolling through LinkedIn, she found an opportunity for a technical support role there.
The skills she had built through the program—both technical and professional—along with her internship experiences, gave her the confidence to apply and clear the online assessment and subsequent technical and HR interviews. When she shared the news with her family, the reaction was overwhelming. “My family is more excited than me. Because my parents only wish was that my daughter would work in a big multinational company. They always said, ‘I hope my daughter works in a company like Microsoft or Google.’ When they heard I got an opportunity to work in Microsoft, nobody could sleep that night due to the excitement.”
For Jui, this is just the beginning. She has a younger brother whom she supports and wants to see get a good education. Looking ahead, her dreams are deeply personal. “Since my parents are from a small town, it is my short-term goal to take him on a plane to some place,” she shares. “For the future, I would like to bring my family out from my hometown and build a home in a city like Pune for them.”
