Women hesitate to take up new roles and responsibilities, often due to the fear that their family life may get neglected or vice versa. Hence, they make a compromise and settle down for less challenging roles and lose track of their career growth. "I too had gone through such a dilemma, but fortunately for me two of the major promotions came my way after I had my children. I was very motivated to come back to work since I had very exciting work to do," she says. For Alka it was the support that her family readily extended, especially the unconditional support her mother provided, that motivated her to get back to work soon after and take up new roles and responsibilities. Significantly, it was her mother who had supported her earlier too, in nurturing her dreams of pursing a career in this industry.

Hailing from a middle class family, Alka was born and brought up in a modern background in Delhi. When in high school, she nurtured the dream of going to the U.S. and pursuing higher studies. No one in her entire family, leave alone girls, had ever wanted to go abroad to purse studies and a career. But Alka's mother, who herself was a workingwoman; encouraged her to live her dreams and pursue her ambitions.

Though on her first attempt she did not qualify for a scholarship, she succeeded in her second attempt and went to the U.S. and obtained a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Smith College (Northampton, MA) and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH). Soon after, Alka landed with her first job at Cabletron Systems, a switch manufacturer, and worked with them for over three years as a software developer, developing network management solutions for their switches. Later in 1996, she joined Cisco and has been with it ever since. She joined as a test engineer, testing new products such as ISDN small office and home office routers. Later she was responsible for performance engineering for the first Internet service provider dial-up modem solution, called Access Path. In the year 2000, Alka joined the ATM switching team as a senior manager and was responsible for the systems and solutions test teams, where she worked with large customers like AT&T to test their large scale data network deployments that included frame relay and MPLS networks. Steadily scaling up the ladder, Alka soon took charge of the global team that was delivering solution releases in the Unified Communications space. The Golden Bridge team, which she formed, worked with multiple stakeholders including systems marketing and field and business units to define, manage, test, document, and support the solutions.

Today, as the Director of Engineering, Alka leads the Voice Technology Group (VTG) product development in India. Handling a team of about 180 people, she leads the software development, test, and documentation organizations for IP Communications BU and Contact Center BU in India. As the VTG lead in India, she is responsible for interfacing with customers, sales teams, and partners to understand and deliver features and solutions for the local and global Unified Communications market.

With over one fourth of her team being women, she now makes it a point to take extra efforts to mentor them so that they do not deviate from their career path. Alka is an active member of Cisco's Women Action Network (WAN) that constantly works towards gender inclusivity and women leadership. "I encourage every woman professional in my team to be part of WAN where they can get a platform to showcase their talent, develop skills, and get adequate mentorship from seasoned professionals," she explains. Apart from this, Alka holds informal meetings with her team members where techies can reach out to her and the senior managers and talk about the problems and challenges they face, professionally and personally, without hesitation. In turn, she and other seniors tell them about their experiences and what they did when they were in a similar fix.