#3 Reasons Why Changing Your Profession Is The Right Thing To Do Forty-one-year-old Priti Shah's is the story of a woman who tried her hands at unique but rare business ventures.

Today, women have gained strong foothold in tech domains, but these are still less frequented roads for majority of them as they are yet to explore uncharted territories. Parallel to this somewhat grim trend runs the success stories of women. Now, we see them in top positions of some of the prominent banks in the country. Statistics show that women's presence in company boardrooms has gone steadily up from six per cent in 2006 to 14.6 per cent now.

Forty-one-year-old Priti Shah's is the story of a woman who tried her hands at unique but rare ventures. Disparate projects and initiatives make up for her career. After treading a few miles in the travel and tourism business, she swerved into fin-tech in an adventurous and challenging shift. She started off as a lecturer of travel and tourism at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women's University and subsequently went on to become a travel consultant at Highland Tours. She later became a business partner at CD Tours and Travels. She made her foray into online payment services in 2005 while joining E-Billing Solutions (EBS) and with time grew to become the president of the E-commerce. Relying largely on the strength of EBS's success and lured by her dream of shaping up her own BIZ Experiencesial venture, Priti co-founded Paynear Solutions in 2013. In an exclusive interview to the BIZ Experiences India, Priti speaks of three reasons why a change in career paths is important for women.

Change Is The Only Constant

"Change is a very important aspect of growing. Though changing one's career often becomes a very tough move, but one has to come out of the comfort zone to take a take big leap in life — be it personal or professional. The same procedure will give the same outcome. Your ability to accept change is proportionate to your aspirations and dreams, higher the aspirations bigger the change," she said. "For me the change from a core travel professional and a travel professor to payments was adventurous and challenging. Computers and cards both were Greek to me. When I started in payment space as an assistant manager, I never knew how to configure a chat or email id and it is all the more difficult when you have all the geeks around you," she added.

There's No Age For Starting Anew

When one opts for a new career option, it's not necessary that he or she had to know everything about it under the sun, she said. "I believe there is neither age nor time to learn new things and the time is never wrong to do right things. I did not have a credit and debit card when I started. I learnt from scratch in the payment business. My will to learn new things and determination to change made my endeavour yield results. I also had the advantage of learning from the right people around me. My husband, colleagues and boss helped and encouraged me in pursuing online payment services. Knowledge is in abundance and is no one's property, filtering and absorbing it depends on your bandwidth," she opined.

Courage To Learn

Trying and failing is more courageous than not attempting to do what you want, said a resolute Priti. "In our society, you might be intimidated, discouraged and underestimated for just being a woman. But, courage and knowledge are above gender discrimination. It's tough to succeed in a male-dominated world, but the situation is changing. But, the world needs more leaders and innovative people. We need to make the change happen," she said. Women do not need any special skill to make it big in any industry. Common skills like patience, leadership, innovation, common sense and most important inquisitiveness to learn will keep you in good stead in whatever you do, she added.