Valuing Values: How Shweta Malik Stopped Worrying About a Job Title and Found Fulfillment Instead

Shweta Malik has held several roles at Intel since joining the company full time nearly six years ago. Even before she started at Intel, she considered it her dream job. And no matter her role, she was always eager to fill it. From one position to the next, her work revolved around two things: power and performance.

 



“I started as a design engineer,” says Shweta, “measuring a lot of power in simulation. Then I moved into the post-silicon realm, where I was working in a lab, testing real hardware and getting real power numbers. After that, I moved to the client side of things, working on our next generation of Intel® Core™ processors. The whole time, I never forgot one of the things my first manager at Intel told me: ‘Focus on building your skills, because skills are transferable.’”.

With every new role, Shweta soaked up new knowledge and new expertise—all of which helped her exponentially as she advanced from one role to the next. And then, just days before she was supposed to leave for her first sabbatical, Shweta was asked to switch roles yet again.

“For me, it was an opportunity to go out and seek what I really wanted to do,” she says.

And what she really wanted to do was be a program manager. Shweta had both the leadership skills and the technical skills, and a job as a program manager would allow her to blend both into a single role. She began her search. But the more she searched on title alone, the more trouble she had finding anything that suited her. After coming up empty for 40 days, she changed her tactic. She started looking for a new role based on the values of the position rather than the job title itself. And just like that, she had four offers from four different groups within Intel.

“One of the values was finding something that included a lot of technical work,” says Shweta, “which has always been important to me. Another value was collaboration. Being closer to our customer, work-life balance, and being on an inclusive team.”

In a career that’s revolved around power and performance, Shweta has always kept her own battery fully charged with a passion for education and technology. And now she works in a group that exists at the crossroads of the two—a role she found only because she stopped looking for a job title and focused instead on what she values in her heart.

Her group deals with Chromebooks, a laptop type used heavily in education. They work on finding new ways to enhance the battery life of Chromebooks.

While she’s spent the entirety of her career pushing herself to learn new skills so she can grow professionally, Shweta also has a great passion for sharing what she’s learned and educating others.

Since day one at Intel, she’s been a member of NextGen Professionals—an employee group dedicated to helping people develop their leadership skills and careers at Intel—and now serves as the group’s leader at her Hillsboro location. She also helps young kids prepare for their own careers. Whether through the virtual conversation series she launched during COVID, called Digital TeachUP, or a mentorship program she launched a few years back, Shweta loves doing outreach to high school students. Because, as she puts it, “They are the future of our country, our future Intel employees.”

“Coming from India,” says Shweta, “my first dream was to study in America. My second dream was to work at Intel. It’s the only company I have worked for in my entire career. We have the best engineers and teams, and the best knowledge when it comes to design. But I also love how much the company values diversity and inclusion. Values are very important. What Intel values, I value. Because for me, my job needs to be more than a paycheck, it needs to be my passion.”

 

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