As the first day of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 in Houston, Texas, got underway, attendees began making professional contacts, conducting interviews and encountering new companies.

One attendee taking advantage of the Grace Hopper event was Olga Braylovskiy, VP of workforce technology at Intuit, Inc., along with more than 80 other Intuit associates. Braylovskiy sat down to talk with John Furrier and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about the conference, its speakers and Intuit’s workplace environment.

Learning opportunities

“What’s unique about Grace Hopper is sheer brainpower,” said Braylovskiy, who was excited and impressed by the turnout at the conference. Part of this excitement was due to the chance for career-minded individuals to connect with more senior counterparts, with the more established workers having an early chance to spot promising talent.

“There is an opportunity for early career women to learn from mid-career and senior individuals, and vice versa,” Braylovskiy said. “I always think of mentorship as a hugely beneficial relation,” she continued, moving from the context of the Grace Hopper Celebration to Intuit’s corporate setting. “Intuit’s culture … is a culture of teaching.”

While noting that there may not be official mentoring programs in place in every one of the company’s divisions, there was an enveloping emphasis on colleagues learning from each other.

Recognizing talent

“Diverse teams… build better products and create better services,” explained Braylovskiy. In fact, part of her focus as VP of workforce technology is recognizing potential, even if an individual is not completely ready for a particular task. Coming to Grace Hopper, that search for talent was continued in the quest to recruit tomorrow’s top technical talent, with an eye toward engineering, design, product management and data handlers, in particular.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Woman In Computing. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE