Rav Bumbra and the question that became a career

Rav Bumbra wanted a game of pool. In a recruitment workplace early in her career, she walked into a room full of men and picked up a cue. The reception made her feel as though she had entered somewhere forbidden. She remembered being warned to leave before the boss saw her. An office recreation room had somehow acquired the admission policy of a private club.

She had a comparison available. At CompuServe in the mid-1990s, she had worked in sales, explaining internet services to customers. She remembered a diverse business where managers listened. Later, returning from maternity leave, she proposed working different hours. The company agreed. One workplace made a conversation possible; another made a game of pool uncomfortable.

That contrast is a useful place to begin with Bumbra, now the Bristol-based founder and CEO of Cajigo. Her work concerns the moments when somebody decides whether an industry has room for her. Sometimes that decision comes before an application. Sometimes it arrives after the employee pass has been issued.

The candidates who were missing

Her route into technology had already involved some hesitation. A postgraduate IT course, surrounded largely by men, had made the industry feel uninviting. CompuServe helped change that impression. Consulting and technical recruitment followed, giving her a view of the people employers wanted and the people their searches were producing.

One question kept returning: “where are the women?” Recruitment made the imbalance tangible. It appeared in the candidates being put forward, rather than remaining an abstract discussion about the sector. Bumbra started coaching women through the prospect of applying and talking to employers about their own part in widening access.

By 2015, she had founded Structur3dpeople, the diversity consultancy through which she worked on recruitment, retention and career development. The question had become a business. It also contained a second question: once a woman entered technology, what would help her stay and move forward?

There is a particular advantage to noticing a problem from a recruitment desk. You see ambition translated into a job description, an application, an interview. Each stage can lose someone. Bumbra’s subsequent work keeps returning to those ordinary transactions, where a useful conversation can have more consequence than a polished statement of intent.

Before the download

Cajigo’s beginnings have several dates because the work developed in stages. Research with women came in 2015. Conversations with schools, teachers, parents and students followed. The social arm of the consultancy began in 2017; an app beta was developed and tested in 2018. Cajigo dates its official launch to 2020. A company’s origin can be less like a ribbon-cutting than a succession of doors being tried.

The sequence matters. Bumbra was working out which barriers women encountered before deciding how to deliver support more widely. An app offered a way to carry mentoring beyond the room in which it began. Trials with women, students and schools helped connect the product with different stages of a working life.

By 2022, Cajigo had introduced its 100 Women in Tech accelerator, originally a 16-week programme. It brought together women from different backgrounds and career stages. The ambition was practical: build knowledge, develop skills and help participants take charge of their next opportunity.

A classroom is an early career decision

In 2018, Bumbra was already talking about bringing female students from Bristol’s four universities together. The attraction was a network students could carry into employment. People leaving education would have others to compare experiences with, ask questions of and turn to as work became less familiar than the timetable they had left behind.

Her school work moves that encounter earlier. Cajigo Girls connects STEM subjects with technology careers and the people doing them. Its offer includes help with understanding pathways and developing the confidence to consider them. For a pupil choosing subjects, a working adult’s account of an ordinary Tuesday can make an unfamiliar occupation easier to imagine.

There is a concrete glimpse of that work in July 2024. Year 8 girls at Hans Price Academy took part in a virtual Women in STEM presentation with Bumbra. She had been working with Cabot Learning Federation schools since 2018. The federation reported a 300% rise in girls choosing computer science and other technology subjects offered at GCSE in its schools.

That is a reported change in a particular group of schools. It belongs beside the date and setting, rather than floating around as a promise for every classroom. More revealing for this story is the continuity: a relationship that began in 2018 was still bringing career conversations to pupils six years later.

An introduction needs a second conversation

Cajigo’s current accelerator describes a structured eight-week programme for career changers, returners, graduates, unemployed women and people already working in industry. It matches mentors and mentees, provides weekly drop-in sessions and introduces employers to women developing their careers. The offer recognises that people can need guidance at several points, including well after their first job.

A mentor makes the industry less anonymous. Someone can explain a role, discuss an application or help a participant put an experience into words. A regular session gives the next question somewhere to go. The calendar is part of the product: a person knows there will be another opportunity to ask.

For Emma Jourzac, who moved from teaching towards a technology career, the support included Bumbra personally reaching out to understand her story. Jourzac recalls industry speakers, networking, mentoring and sessions that continued after the programme ended. When she landed her first tech role, Bumbra invited her to share the experience with the group and offered feedback on her public speaking. The participant was becoming someone others could learn from. That is a useful way for a network to grow: the next example is already sitting among the people asking questions.

Bumbra also hosts Women Talk Tech, the Instagram Live interview series featuring women’s routes through technology. The format makes room for the details a job title leaves out. A career can look remarkably tidy once it has been compressed into three lines of biography. Conversation gives it some of its detours back.

Published biographies describe Cajigo supporting women across 26 countries. That reach places a considerable distance between the Bristol recruitment question and the people now encountering the programmes. Yet the underlying activity remains recognisable: somebody describes an ambition, somebody listens, and a next step becomes easier to see.

The founder learns too

Bumbra has been unusually willing to describe receiving the sort of support she provides. In a 2021 reflection on a Black South West Network business programme supported by NatWest, she recalled discovering the opportunity after checking her junk folder. Spam filters are rarely credited in company origin stories. This one deserves a modest supporting role.

The programme helped her examine customers, routes to market, finance and the business model. She particularly valued working through the business model canvas and customer journeys. The woman helping others interpret an industry was taking time to interpret her own enterprise.

Those reflections add useful texture to the founder title. A clear purpose still leaves invoices, delivery and growth to work out. Help can be necessary even when the person asking for it has spent years helping others. Bumbra’s account gives learning a visible place in the business, alongside the mission.

“You are solving a problem that you see in the world.”

Rav Bumbra, on entrepreneurship, 2021

The recognition followed a different timetable. Computer Weekly named her a Rising Star in 2018 and inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2022. In 2023 came recognition at the European Diversity Awards. At the 2024 UK Women in IT Awards she won both Woman of the Year and Outstanding Contribution to the Technology Industry.

She also won the Women in Tech category at the 2024 Tech South West Awards. That November, she was named among the members of the region’s newly formed technology advisory board, bringing her work into a conversation involving business, investment and education. Her wider commitments have included a directorship at Women of the Year Lunch and Awards.

Awards can make a career appear to move from ceremony to ceremony. Here, the more useful chronology runs through the work being recognised: recruitment, mentoring, school visits, a community, then another set of participants. The trophies provide dates. The recurring appointments explain what fills the weeks between them.

The app changes. The question stays.

In October 2026, Cajigo’s homepage announces that its app is being retired that month and that Cajigo 2.0 is coming. The accelerator page describes the eight-week format. For Bumbra, this is another point where a familiar method of delivery is changing around a continuing purpose.

Her recent public writing also puts attention on retention. She describes women repeatedly having to establish their credibility, missing sponsorship and encountering flexibility that exists more convincingly in policy than in practice. Her argument asks employers to examine daily experience as closely as they examine recruitment.

That brings the story back to the office room with the pool table. An organisation communicates who belongs through its smallest arrangements: who gets invited in, who is heard, which request receives a reasonable answer. Career support has to meet people on both sides of the door.

Bumbra began by asking where the women were. Years of building Cajigo have made the follow-up unavoidable: what happens when they arrive? It is a question for the mentor, the manager and the person organising the next meeting. Each has a chance to make the answer a little easier to live with.