Tag: event

Attended the seminar "Which professionals 'survive' the crisis? Strategies for the balanced development of specialists". On the whole, I came away with a positive impression — it was presented in an interesting way and not boring at all, which is rare for this sort of thing. The main part took about 45 minutes and answering questions took 30 minutes. A lot of what was said is obvious anyway, but you don't always manage to express and put in order what's in your head, and when you hear it from the outside, everything falls into place and settles better. I also got new information to think about.

There were quite a lot of people at the seminar — representatives of various firms in the city, students and university lecturers. It's clear that some of the KhSU students were kept after class to fill out the crowd, but it was hardly the majority. I came, almost ran, after work, right before the start, and registered as number 65 on one of the lists — though it's not clear whether there was one list or several.

It was nice to see familiar faces I hadn't seen in a long time. I sat again at the same table in a lecture hall with classmates I'd sat with during our years of study.

I made notes throughout the seminar and wrote down some of the interesting bits — though there's not much at the beginning of the notes, since I was out of breath and recovering from the fast walking. In the end, enough thoughts and memories came up; most of them are laid out below. If I didn't mention something, it just means I agree with it.

Life is a curious thing. Just recently I was an unemployed graduate without any work experience whatsoever... And over the past week I've been at two jobs in my field. I wouldn't have thought it myself. And I wouldn't have thought you could find such a good job in Kherson as the one I landed at the end of last week. Now I just have to hold on to it.

Now a few notes on the "programmer in Kherson" job search. There is a point to posting your resume on job-search sites; more than two weeks passed from posting it to the call with the offer. I'm not counting one interesting offer by email from a neighboring regional center, and offers to earn money at home through clicks, mailings, advertising, distributing "Oriflame" products... And, finally, what really helped was that in my resume I mentioned the second place in Ukraine at the Junior Academy of Sciences, and I probably did the right thing by not writing in which discipline I achieved this. I still need to somehow fight against my inflated demands on myself and my low self-esteem, but that's more about taking the initiative myself — making calls and sending resumes to specific employers.

It's interesting, though — at the university no one cared about or was interested in past achievements, but for a good job they do matter. Thanks to everyone who pushed me and gave me the chance to prove myself. Although it's unlikely anyone will read this, I need to say it in person.

I attended a four-hour seminar by DataArt's executive director Mikhail Zavileysky, "The Professional Career of an IT and Technical Specialist. A Training Seminar on Personal Effectiveness".

There were some interesting moments here and there. But looking at it as a whole, the speaker said nothing fundamentally new — all of this information can be found on the Internet if you want, and most of what was said is intuitively obvious anyway, or becomes clear after analyzing the situation for a bit. Although I've noticed more than once that what's intuitively obvious and elementary to me turns out to be a revelation for others... Also, everything was laid out fairly clearly and coherently, which you can't always manage with the thoughts swarming around in your own head. So I think many found the seminar useful. He also said that the IT industry in Kherson is only just developing, which is why the percentage of newcomers here was higher than in other cities. A training like this probably doesn't offer much to people who have worked for several years and changed a couple-three jobs. And most of what was said applies to outsourcing companies — it's just the thing for us, but in the other major cities where the seminar was held earlier, an even smaller percentage of those present probably needed this kind of information.

In the end, what I liked most were the various jokes during the talk and the real stories from the experience of companies and people. I was also interested in the bits about how to behave with management, but that's more because I haven't worked yet, and along the way it becomes clear on its own anyway. Also, during the second, longer part I no longer felt like sleeping — that was more because of the windows they opened after the break.

The seminar itself was held for DataArt's PR and for the director's self-expression, which at this stage of the company's development is of very little use. Although promotion isn't really needed here either — they write about it in the newspapers as it is. They'd be better off coming to the technical university to talk about themselves to all the groups, because instead they came to the third-year students, who hadn't yet covered .NET (no point talking about Java, since it's not in the curriculum), and scared them off with the requirements they impose. They didn't show up for the fourth-year students, and as a result, out of my group, 5 of the 7 students who could be called programmers (that's in a group of 23 people) went for an interview at Aricent, whose representative had visited one of our lectures.