Saundarya Rajesh

Saundarya Rajesh is an Indian social entrepreneur. She is the founder president of AVTAR Career Creators, a talent strategy consulting firm, and FLEXI Careers India, a social enterprise focusing on creating sustainable careers for women, based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
Early life
Saundarya Rajesh grew up in the city of Pondicherry. She completed her schooling at St. Joseph of Cluny Higher Secondary School and her bachelor's degree in English Literature from Bharathidasan Government Arts College for Women at Pondicherry, which was then affiliated to University of Madras. She emerged University First and was a gold medallist in her BA and then proceeded to do her MBA from School of Management, Central University Pondicherry.
She obtained campus placement into Citibank N.A, and went on to manage Merchant Services at Citibank.
Career
Saundarya continued working at Citibank after her marriage but after the birth of her son, she decided to take a break in career, when she found that women’s careers were not sustainable in the absence of proper day care services and formalized flexible working methods. She worked as a producer and compere for All India Radio and Doordarshan between the year 1992-1995, and also anchored brief start-up projects.
In all her assignments, she sought and insisted on flexible working, often compromising pay in the quest for control over her time.
In the year 1995, Saundarya took up the opportunity of working as a part-time lecturer in management at M.O.P.Vaishnav College for women. While she was actively involved in teaching, she also associated herself with a local recruitment agency and used this opportunity to obtain placements for her women students. During this period, she also undertook several research studies to ascertain that Indian women viewed their careers very differently as compared to their western counterparts and required several career enablers to sustain at the workplace.
In the 2000, Saundarya was diagnosed with infected nodules on her vocal chords, which impaired her speaking completely. She was advised total voice arrest by doctors. Giving up her part-time career, Saundarya took a break for the second time. Realizing that she needed to pursue her passion of creating sustainable careers for marginalised pools of talent, in December 2000, Saundarya set up AVTAR Career Creators along with a few friends.
AVTAR Career Creators
AVTAR Career Creators started functioning at Chennai in December 2000. A talent strategy consulting firm, AVTAR works in the area of on-ramping strategies, just-in-time recruitment solutions and contingency hiring. With over 7 verticals, each focusing on a separate industry specialization, AVTAR is among the first few organizations to manage end-to-end recruitment turn-key projects. Believing in the credo that advocacy is required to provide opportunities for off-beat talent, AVTAR
works with organizations to create special career tracks.
AVTAR Career Creators has also incubated AVTAR I-WIN - India’s first career service for women. AVTAR I-WIN engages in tripartite consulting - 1) with women, 2) with the society and 3) with organizations to create sustainable careers for women. Members of the AVTAR I-WIN network are women professionals, who want to make a career comeback or house wives without any work experience who want to engage in a career for the first time in their lives. AVTAR is an ISO 9001 : 2008 certified organization. With the headquarters in Chennai, AVTAR has branches in Coimbatore, Bangalore and Mumbai.
AVTAR I-WIN
AVTAR I-WIN is an abbreviation of AVTAR Interim Women-managers’ Interface Network. This service was created in the year 2005 with the vision that India needs to harness its women managerial talent fully by providing enablers which will help them to stay engaged to their careers. Economic and intellectual empowerment of women is one of the major goals of AVTAR I-WIN. The 1.5 million second career women who have dropped off the career track due to non-sustainable career practices are the focus of all the efforts of AVTAR I-WIN. Being India’s first career service exclusively for women, AVTAR I-WIN is a networking, skill-building and career enabling initiative. It has 26,000 registered members and has provided work-life integrated career options to over 3500 women, across metros, cities and towns of India.
AVTAR I-WIN works towards creating sustainable careers for women and to increase workforce participation rate of women in India.
It has now become a social enterprise called FLEXI Careers India.
Segue Sessions
FLEXI Careers India, the social enterprise arm of AVTAR uses applied research, in making use of research based inputs to enable workplace development. Via research projects conducted by FLEXI, it has been found that women face challenges when they choose to make a transition to a career whether full-time / flexi-time / part-time. As a result of this research, the SEGUE SESSIONS, India’s first large-format skill building initiative for women seeking transition in their careers, was created. The SEGUE SESSIONS was launched on . Following that, SEGUE SESSIONS were held in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Jaipur and Gurgaon in the year 2012. In 2013 the SEGUE SESSIONS series started with the Hyderabad edition on March 8th.
Over 2000 women were trained in attitudinal skills relevant to make a come-back into a second career
, the SEGUE SESSIONS are proposed to be conducted across the country, reaching hundreds of thousands of women professionals to help them bridge their hiatus in searching for a sustainable career. The word ‘SEGUE’ is a musical term, depicting seamless transition. se·gue to make a transition from one thing to another smoothly
Awards and Recognitions
Saundarya Rajesh has won several awards and recognition for being a woman entrepreneur with a vision to not only increase women’s workforce participation rate in India, but also the first proponent of formalized flexible ways of working for women.
Her awards include:
* The SCOPE Women Exemplar award in 2006,
* The Yuvashakthi Entrepreneur of the year award in 2007,
* The Swadeshi Jagran Manch woman business leader award in 2008
* CavinKare’s Chinnikrishnan Innovation award in 2011.
* Tie Stree Shakti Women Entrepreneur Award 2011
* FCCI FLO Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award Mar 2012
* Saveetha Best Entrepreneur Award 2013 presented by Saveetha Engineering College & Network Of Saveetha TechpreneursNEST
Saundarya has also authored several research papers on women's careers and is in the process of completing her PhD in women's careers from SRM University. She writes columns on Gender Balance and Diversity & Inclusion for the Economic Times, Business Line, Outlook Money and Business World. She has been featured in the Coffee Table book by India Today on Women Entrepreneurs of Tamilnadu, called 'Business Wizards of Tamilnadu' and in the book 'Dreams to Destiny' by The Indus Entrepreneurs.

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