Start of your career [ENIAC Board]

Starting a new job might be an exciting move. Who will be your new team mates? Who do you ask questions about in your practice? How do you build friendships with your new team members? All of that comes into play when you are leaving the UT or starting a new job. Sometimes you get plenty of support, perhaps even a week-by-week activity list to take your first steps.

One of the fun parts of starting to work is a new challenge. Often you have puzzles to solve, but what kind of puzzle do you take on? Do you like a technical puzzle to create a solution for a given problem? Try to learn from an expert in your team. Do you like to organize and manage a team? Have a chat with your scrum master, product owner or team leader. Do not be afraid to introduce yourself to all members of your team, it will make collaboration easier and grow trust in your team. Additionally, by putting yourself forward into the spotlight, you introduce others to the challenges you face, as well as shine a light on your ambitions. This might sound hard at first, but in the end humans are very eager to help others.

Keen to learn more from alumni who have been through the journey of starting their career? One place to surely find support is ENIAC, the alumni association of Inter-Actief. By joining activities such as regional drinks – which ENIAC organizes every 2 months – or the larger ones as zoos and theme parks you will find alumni that can help you. Feel free to ask questions on their start, difficulties they had to overcome or tips to grow in your current position.

Often you are assigned a coach to help you get started and ask any questions you may have the first weeks. Try to socialize with all team members to get to know them. This may take some caution, as some members might be pressed on time and stressed to finish something in a project. See what moment is opportune to have a chat. People love to share what they have done and accomplished in their job, this may help you find what is important for them and how you can help the team grow.

As a fresh start you bring new knowledge into the team. Share your acquired knowledge from university courses and try to apply them in practice. As you are getting up to speed on the new project, you can use this time to understand what the required domain knowledge is and what opportunities for innovation are available. Do not push your agenda as that may hinder sharing knowledge, try to solve challenges they present using innovative methods or practices you master. During this time I created Python scripts to analyze data more efficiently on a target system, reducing the time required to create bug reports and investigate the observed behavior. As others saw the time saved and new tools to investigate problems they adopted this. Over time, based on this work, I created a challenge for new starters to learn domain specific knowledge in an interactive way. This visualization of data eliminates the need for mastering the system to gain basic information.

In a few years you will be the medior to guide and mentor new colleagues. One easy route is to start supervising graduate students. Why? They bring new knowledge to your team! And you can help them get started with their practice. What information did you wish you had when you started? By supervising you learn how to share knowledge, whilst the student is still semi-autonomous as required for graduation. This is a great way to start your mentoring skills. Keen to start supervising? Join one of the ENIAC Speeddates as a company to find graduating master students. During this evening you will participate in 5 minutes of one on one chats with students to quickly find potential students to join as your team member.

ENIAC

The ENschedese Informatica Alumni Club – ENIAC – is the alumni association for computer science, business information technology and related fields of the University of Twente. The ENIAC board of 2024 consists of Josje, Koen and Kevin.
Are you about to graduate but not yet a member of ENIAC? Membership starts from only € 5,- per year. As a member you will receive the I/O Vivat published to stay close to your academic roots and Inter-Actief. You are invited to all organized events. Most of these events are free to join for members and you are even allowed to bring friends outside of ENIAC/Inter-Actief. Even more important, it helps you stay connected with your roots and students from your time at the University of Twente!