On May 24th, 2023 Barclays organized an event together with Femme Palette. Barclays speakers Kateryna Gurova (VP, Risk, Finance, and Treasury), Zuzana Fraňová (Jr. Full Stack Developer), and Martina Vladar (Senior Business Analyst) shared their stories and tips for a successful transition into the tech field and career growth. By hearing and learning from the speakers’ experience, this panel aimed to give the attendees some practical tools you can use to accelerate your career!
Lucie Neumanova, Co-Founder and CEO at Femme Palette, followed up with the 3 speakers and asked them a few questions, please read more below.
My name is Zuzana Franova, I am a Software Engineer, I studied Marketing Management at the Comenius University in Bratislava and got a cool product marketing job at adidas. But after 10 years in marketing and difficult pandemic years I have decided that I need a change. I started by studying online by myself, but I have quickly realized that it won`t be enough. I need someone senior to guide me, I need contacts. So I have signed up for coding academy and 4 months later I started at Barclays as a Technology Apprentice. I am currently part of the Graduate program, working as a C# developer on a risk generation platform.
It was great to see so many women interested in tech. It is amazing field and it still lacks “female point of view”. What I mean is, that women bring new interesting ideas and approaches (not only) to software development. At the end of the day, around half of the users are women! So why shouldn`t we bring more female experience to the development teams? It is a no-brainer.
I am really happy that events like these are happening and hopefully we encourage more women to join IT field and hence improve the general user experience.
Be ready to never stop learning. If you enjoy learning new things every day, IT is the right place for you! The best thing is, that everyone around you is also learning all the time. We have very supportive atmosphere in my current team at Barclays and we share our knowledge on daily basis. It makes me feel really good when even senior developers come to me and ask for an advice.
My name is Kateryna Gurova, I'm a software engineering team lead. I have Computer Science education and have been with Barclays for 10 years in two locations - Kyiv and Prague. My career to date includes growing from graduate SE to SE Team Lead and manager. I have changed several roles and positions - with using .NET technologies in all of them.
It was great to be part of such event. Audience actively participated by asking interesting questions that ranged from starting career in IT to challenges faced in IT industry. It created inclusive atmosphere with a sense of community among everyone - which shows importance of such events. Discussions and sharing experience afterwards were also great. In addition speaking in such wider audience offline aligned with my goals and helped me to overcome some of my own fears and insecurities.
Hard to come up with just one. Placing myself in a position where I would be considering starting a career in IT, I'd advise just to trust yourself, not to chase after all the knowledge at once, but to locate smth you're most interested in, what you enjoy doing and focus on improving yourself.
My name is Martina Vladar and I am currently working as a Senior Business Analyst leading a team of business analysts working primarily with internal risk systems. My background is in Quantitative Finance and the journey to tech was a bit more straightforward for me as I had basic in programming experience during my studies. I found the analyst job a perfect match for me having the role between IT and business. Beside work agenda I am very active in local Employee Resource Groups Barclays Prague initiatives focusing on gender diversity that is an important topic for me.
It has been few months since the event and I have just the best recalls on that. What I found truly enriching was the networking part. I had several conversations and personal stories shared on the willingness to switch to the tech field and to grow in area that may not have the best gender diversity balance.
I am a big supporter of such events helping to break any barrier that may exists.
It’s important to have the willingness to learn new things. There are many initiatives locally as well as globally that provide supported learning and materials that may be a good starting point. Also don’t forget that IT offers many roles such as Developer, Analyst or Quality Assurance Tester.
