Meet Sapna Naik, Global Head of Credit Research at Robeco

Sapna Naik took a job in an industry nobody around her had heard of, and over two decades later is Global Head of Credit Research at one of Europe's largest asset managers. “Here’s what she’d tell anyone just starting out.”

There's a moment most people wait for before they make a move. The moment it starts to feel safe. When the path is clear enough, the risk small enough, and you're finally sure you're ready.

Early in a career, that moment feels like a rule. There's a sequence, and you're near the bottom of it: put in the years, earn the title, and then you get to have ideas.

Sapna Naik rarely waited for that moment. Decades on, it's the thing that explains most of her career, and it's the part of her story that costs you nothing to copy.

Grew up in India, where the bright ones became doctors or engineers. BSc in Economics, then an MBA in Finance. Started on the sell side as an equity analyst at HSBC. She has now over two decades of experience in the investment industry, fifteen of them at Robeco, where she is now Global Head of Credit Research. And, with her team, she built an AI tool that turns weeks of research into hours.

Every one of those lines started as a decision made without a blueprint, usually before she felt qualified to make it. That's a mindset, not a credential. You can bring it with you from your first job; you don't acquire it with a title.

When Sapna was studying in India, the path for bright students was clear. Engineering. Medicine. If you went into finance, you became a retail banker or a chartered accountant. Investment research was a very new concept.

She landed a two-month internship at an equities research firm. She liked what she saw. When it ended, they offered her a job. She said yes.

"I wasn't thinking about whether it was a career for someone like me. I was curious. It looked interesting, so I decided to give it a try."

Notice how small that decision was. Not a five-year plan. Two months in something that looked interesting.

If you're holding out for evidence that your slightly unusual choice will work, she didn't have any either. No role model had walked that path before her. No mentor, either. Nobody a step ahead to say which parts were normal and which were worth worrying about. She just didn't see a reason to wait.

That absence shaped more of her career than the internship did. We'll come back to it.

Watch the years that follow and the same thing keeps surfacing. Never a grand plan. Just: someone has to take this on, and I'm not going to wait to be asked.

She joined an industry nobody around her was recommending. She came back from maternity leave with a foggy head and a heart pulled in two directions, while leading a team of five. She moved into senior roles in rooms where women were scarce, and didn't make it mean anything other than: someone has to be here, it might as well be me.

"You have to accept that you can't be 100% everywhere. Be kind to yourself. And then get back to work."

The unglamorous version of initiative is the one you'll use most. It's saying the awkward thing while it's still small: flagging the error, asking the question everyone else is also confused by, raising the problem in week one instead of month three.

"If something needs addressing, address it early. Even when it's uncomfortable. Especially then."

The story of the AI tool doesn't start with AI. It starts with a team that was short-staffed and a kind of work that doesn't wait.

New issuance arrives with a clock attached. A deal comes to market, and the window to understand it, form a view and act is narrow. Sapna's team was feeling that pressure of doing a lot within a deadline.

Meanwhile the technology had quietly become good enough to help. What was missing wasn't capability. It was a platform to put it to work on their actual problem.

She could have flagged the issue, delegated it, and waited. No one would have questioned that approach. Instead, she took ownership, treating the problem as her team's to solve rather than someone else's to address.

So they built a tool. Tested it. Refined it. Documented the results. Then they went to senior management, not with a vision, but with something concrete and outcomes that spoke for themselves. Management backed them.

It took a year to bring into action. The platform is now used extensively across Robeco.

"Research that used to take two weeks now takes a few hours. That time saved goes straight back into the things that actually matter: the judgment calls, the team, the conversations that support fund performance."

This is the most portable thing in her story, and it works at any level. You will be told that big organisations are slow, political and allergic to new ideas. Sometimes that's true. But the ideas that get dismissed are usually the vague ones: the suggestion, the presentation, the "we should really look into this." What gets attention is someone willing to take ownership, turn an idea into a plan, and drive it forward.

Go back to that year for a moment, because it's where the real story lives. Built, tested, refined, documented, backed, live: six words that compress twelve months of work. Her own observation, offered matter-of-factly, is that the gap between starting something and seeing it accepted is almost always longer than you expect.

"Sometimes things just take longer. You have to persevere, and have patience."

Which is the part that's easy to miss when you're early, because it looks like a contradiction. Move before you're ready, then wait? But the two clocks are different. The one before you move is the one you control, and waiting on it costs you outright. The one after you move runs at a pace set by other people's calendars, budgets and attention, and nothing you do speeds it up much. Impatience is what makes people abandon a good idea before it could land.

However, she could not have done it all on her own. It was a team effort, not hers alone, they persevered together through the long middle. And senior management backed them when it counted, which is the part people assume won't happen and so never test.

The initiative started it. Owning the problem is what carried it.

"AI is changing the workflow, but the need for judgment and opinion remains. So focus on the critical thinking, ask for tasks that help you develop it, cultivate it, and preserve it."

The skills that matter most in an AI-augmented world, judgment, empathy, reading a room, building genuine trust, knowing when to push and when to listen, don't get replaced. They get more valuable. When AI picks up the repetitive analysis, human judgment becomes more critical, not less. And human connection is where careers are actually built.

“AI helps take care of some of the more time-consuming work, giving me more space to focus on what really matters: connecting with colleagues, having meaningful conversations and giving thoughtful feedback.”

"Focus on human-centric skills to add value. Embrace AI for the repetitive tasks."

Her framing of the technology itself is deliberately unromantic.

"AI is a tool. Use it to help you sharpen your competitive edge."

Not a colleague, not a threat, not a personality. A tool that lets you do things you couldn't do before. And within a few years, everyone in your field will have access to the same tools. Which means the advantage was never the tool itself. It's the judgment you bring to it, the questions you ask of it, and how early you start learning to use it well.

Go back to her choice of verb for a moment: preserve. It suggests something you can lose without ever consciously giving it up. And that's the real risk of starting a career today. Not that analysis disappears from your desk, but that the answer arrives already formed, sounds plausible, and gets approved before you've worked out what you actually think. The task was never the point. The point was forming a judgment. The task simply forced you to do it.

The risk isn't losing the job. It's losing the habit of developing an opinion.

So the move is to ask, since the beginning of your career, for the work that makes you develop your decision-making skills, and to keep doing the thinking even when a tool would hand it to you faster. As Sapna points out, women in finance adopt AI at lower rates than men, and she sees it as an open door rather than a verdict, because the human-centric skills are often already there.

"If you already have those human skills and add AI on top, you create a powerful advantage."

The window is open. It won't stay open forever.

For more than two decades in the industry, she didn't have someone a step ahead to help her make sense of challenges, put worries into perspective, or remind her that many concerns feel less significant with time.

You can get there without one. But it just costs more than it needs to, in time spent second-guessing and solving problems that were solved decades ago by someone who'd have told you over coffee.

This is why she mentors. And not only those earlier in their careers. At Robeco, she actively supports the reverse mentoring programme, which pairs senior colleagues with younger employees. The idea is simple: learning doesn't only flow from experienced professionals to newcomers. Sometimes the most junior person in the room has insights the most senior person needs.

She's also noticed what happens when people don't get that support. When people don't feel supported in their growth, it can become harder to see a future for themselves within an organization. While there are many reasons people choose to leave, a lack of encouragement and investment can sometimes be part of the picture.

One example she comes back to. Someone ten years into a role they had stopped enjoying, who wanted to move into a different domain entirely and couldn't quite believe they were allowed to. The mentoring didn't hand them a plan. It gave them the confidence to try something new after a decade of doing one thing well, which, at that point in a career, is the harder part by far.

When someone is ten years in, the thing standing between them and a change is rarely capability. It's the sense that the window has closed. It hasn't.

Here's what she says to the people she supports:

"Be curious. Have tenacity."

Curiosity is what makes someone keep pulling at a question after the part they were asked for is finished. Tenacity is what makes them still be there three months later, long after the interesting part of the problem is over. Neither shows up on a CV. Both are obvious within a week of working alongside someone.

And if you're waiting until you're senior enough to mentor anyone: you're not waiting for seniority, you're waiting for permission again. The person a year behind you needs exactly what you worked out last year, in language they still speak.

The same instinct shows up in how she runs a team. She looks for what each person is exceptional at, gives them the project that stretches exactly that, holds them accountable for the result, and trusts them to find their own route to it.

"I give people the freedom to achieve results. I hold them accountable. But I don't stand over them checking every step, because I don't want to be managed like that either."

If you have a manager like that, take the whole thing when it's offered, including the parts you haven't done before. If you don't, you can build the smaller version yourself: find the piece of work nobody has claimed, take it, finish it well. Ownership is rarely announced. It's usually just picked up.

"Discomfort is the point. If everything feels comfortable, you're not growing."

Ask what all of it is in service of and the answer comes back smaller than you'd expect. Not the title. Not the profile.

"Be the best version of yourself."

Don't consider the person next to you as a benchmark: their pace, their promotion, their carefully lit announcement post. Don't wait to be picked. The people who grow most are often the ones who step forward, take ownership, and contribute beyond what is expected of them.

That's why there's value in moving before you're ready. Not because it guarantees success, it doesn't, but because some of the most important learning happens when you take on something that stretches you and makes you become a better version of yourself.