9 Mar 2022
At Bolt, we’ve always believed that women can be a breath of fresh air for the tech field — an industry that has traditionally been heavily male-dominated, with women holding just 25% of jobs in tech. Through our paid internship programme, we aim to help improve those figures dramatically.
Meet our role models — Sharon, Rabiatu and Keziah who took part in our internship programme in 2021. To get a better overview of how the internship looked, they shared their thoughts, worries, highlights and words of encouragement for other women who want to land their dream job tech.
Sharon believes in three things:
Due to these beliefs and the fact that she grew up with the internet, Sharon realised quite early that this industry excites her and that’s the path she’s willing to take. Bolt’s internship was an opportunity that she was and immediately grabbed it.
Getting out of the comfort zone is usually something that scares people, but it wasn’t Sharon’s case: she was excited to leave her comfort zone as she knew that there are new opportunities and connections waiting outside of it.
Sharon recalls that no day was the same: she had to ensure drivers and riders were kept on the road to meet operational targets, attend meetings, analyse data and brainstorm to stay on top.
Sharon encourages other women to take part in the internship: “Start from somewhere and you’d be surprised to find your place, people and community.” And we can’t agree more.
Three key points that Sharon learned during the internship:
Rabiatu is an alumnus of the Ghana Institute of Journalism. However, seeing women in tech rubbing shoulders with men, changing the narrative and perception that tech is a challenging industry and not friendly to women got her interested in this industry.
Bolt’s internship became a great opportunity for Rabiatu to start her journey in tech — challenging and nervous on one hand, but extremely exciting and valuable on the other.
Rabiatu became a marketing intern — without any previous experience, she was successfully working on her projects and learning how social media marketing works.
Diving into a completely new industry is hard and scary, but in Rabiatu’s case, knowing that she can become an inspiration to young girls and women hoping to go into tech was something that kept her motivated and excited.
Rabiatu says that the internship was an eye-opener and life-changing: “Women should believe in themselves and know whatever they put their minds to do, can be achieved.”
“Being a woman in a male-dominated industry can be quite daunting at times, but one of the great things is that big tech companies, such as Bolt, give women opportunities like this one”, says Keziah.
Keziah was a marketing intern at Bolt. When she applied for an internship, her main motivation was to learn from some bright minds in the tech industry and she believed that completing an internship at Bolt would help propel her tech career.
Even though Keziah’s daily responsibilities weren’t directly related to her current role, the opportunity to work with self-motivated individuals still helped Keziah to grow — now she’s a software engineer at Turntabl.
During her internship at Bolt, Keziah was assisting with social media marketing, creating ads and campaigns.
We’re happy to announce that this year the internship program is returning! Thanks to the great feedback we received from last year’s interns, this year we’re calling all women who’ve been dreaming of a career in tech to apply.
The application process is easy — all you need to do is dedicate 10–15 minutes to answer 5 questions. We’ll be accepting responses up until March 30th, 2022.
