Fri, July 7
Article reading time: 6 minutes
Wondering what a company is, you can cite a huge number of terms and concepts that describe the field of activity, technology, internal and external processes of the organization. Only one part always remains unchanged: the company is its employees. The effectiveness of the company directly depends on the qualifications of personnel, relationships in the team, the realization of their own potential and other equally important characteristics. The development of an employee is a real art, requiring experience, skill and a special approach to everyone.
We talked with Andrey Lihodievsky, Chief Operating Officer, Curator of Personnel Development, about key values, as well as the importance of developing employees within SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES.
SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIES is a company with unique potential, and this potential is employees. We are talking about professionals with in-depth knowledge of the banking business domain, flexible thinking, commitment to the cause and the team. These are people who share our culture and values, see development opportunities with the company. And we, in turn, strive to ensure that our company becomes a place of realization of high potential of specialists, a place of great career opportunities and professional growth.
To this end, over the past years we have implemented a number of projects aimed at developing employees.
In order to effectively maintain the relationship between the development of employees and the company, we use the principle of cascading the strategic goals of the company to the goals and objectives of each specialist. At the same time, resource managers, understanding the strengths and points of growth of the team, within the framework of Career Development Day set goals so that they are in the zone of the employee’s immediate development, contribute to rapid movement, professional and personal growth. In addition, transparent competency matrices were developed and successfully implemented (with the participation of key experts in areas), describing the knowledge and skills necessary for the professional development of specialists in various areas. Profile competency matrices allow to understand the specific criteria necessary for career growth and grade improvement.
Our employees (through discussion with resource managers) have versatile development opportunities: participation in pre-sale activities, participation in presentations for customers, participation in the development of new products in new markets. We actively monitor technological trends and quickly promote the development and training of employees with new technologies (for example, Flutter, Camunda). We actively use the experience and knowledge of Senior and System Architect specialists, organizing meetings and events to exchange experience.
Creating new products, we use the accumulated experience in building complex systems, a deep understanding of the processes of interaction between different subsystems, take into account the lessons of previous projects and always openly discuss the possibility of working with a new technology stack.
For these purposes, architectural committees are held on a regular basis, headed by Chief Technical Officer and Head of R&D. We take a holistic look at the processes of training and team development, thanks to which the company trains professionals at each level: specialists, leads, architects, management and top management. For this purpose, the company has implemented tools such as Career Development Days, mentoring, external and internal trainings.
The company provides opportunities for all proactive specialists to show their strengths, realize themselves, and build a career within the company. An example of this is the new heads of departments who have left the project teams in recent years. In order to make the process of adaptation of resource managers in a managerial role as comfortable and successful as possible, the company has developed training available during the period of adaptation to a new role.
The company truly believes in young initiative employees who have a good understanding of the business domain, have experience in negotiating with the client, and are aimed at building a long-term relationship with both our company and the client. For the purpose of their further professional growth, we developed and implemented the “ST-HIPO” – management competencies development program, which provides the opportunity to undergo training programs aimed at developing leadership skills and management competencies.
“ST-HIPO” gives key employees of the company an opportunity to take part in specially designed trainings and interesting master classes, meet with invited experts and, of course, improve their professional level. Participants develop managerial and communication skills, skills of personal efficiency, which they actively apply in their further work.
The program was able to prove its effectiveness, providing employees with a real opportunity to strengthen, increase and, of course, apply their knowledge in the management sphere.
The company’s development process, on the one hand, requires employees to have well-developed professional skills: understanding the architecture of the project, deep hard skills in the technology stack used on the project. On the other hand – creative skills, solutions to non-trivial problems, the ability to offer non-standard solutions that go beyond the current business processes.
In 2014, Satya Nadello became CEO of Microsoft, the third CEO of Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. One day, a journalist asked him, “What’s the secret that the company’s value has grown so much during this time?”. He was a journalist from a financial publication and he expected answers about EBITDA, profitability or margin income. But Satya answered:
“In culture. In our employees. In the growth mentality”.
There may be many opinions on this, but the importance of the system of interaction between the company and personnel is an obvious fact. Business is primarily people who perform their duties every day, striving to do something more for the development of projects and the company as a whole.
That is why we see the success of our company, which develops complex IT solutions, in maintaining a culture of growth and development of high-potential, interested in the common cause of employees.