Sandhya Devanathan, new Meta India head, shares tips on career skills for success

Sandhya Devanathan has been appointed the new head of Meta India

Facebook’s parent company Meta has appointed Sandhya Devanathan as the head of its India business a fortnight after the departure of Meta India's country head Ajit Mohan and other senior executives.

Devanathan is currently the head of Meta’s gaming vertical for Asia-Pacific and will take charge as Vice President of Meta India in January 2023. She has spent almost seven years with Meta, joining the company in 2016.

In a March 2020 blog post for Meta Careers, Sandhya Devanathan spoke about career skills that are important for success in the workplace.

“For soft skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity is key,” she wrote. “If you’re looking for a playbook or a clear roadmap, that likely won’t happen. You need to have a certain level of independence and the ability to quickly adjust to change.”

The second most in-demand skill, according to Devanathan, is the ability to communicate and collaborate. At the height of the remote working era, the will to collaborate becomes all the more important as coworkers don’t have the opportunity to meet regularly in office.

“Another important soft skill that is very important is resilience,” wrote Devanathan in her March 2020 blog post. She explained that working in a team invariably brings you together with people who work at a different pace than you. “Even if you have broad awareness, there could be sudden industry headwinds or a whole economy could collapse. You live in markets in Asia that are vibrant but also somewhat volatile, so having resilience is very important.”

When it comes to hard skills, a deeply analytical mindset is important for Devanathan, even for non-technical roles. She gave the example of marketing and expansion, where employees rely on data-driven advice to figure out which markets to expand into. “We need to consider things like cross-border insights, roll-out strategies, and advice on digital transformation,” she wrote.

Last but not least, the other hard skill that go a long way in an organisation like Meta is planning ability and execution rigor. Strategy, Devanathan explained, is important. But strategy is useless when an employee can’t plan ahead and see what needs to be done today and what needs to play out long term.