Out of over 60 candidates, five finalists were selected to participate and together with their mentors work on a real-life project. The youngsters will be working on an in-house project, which will be used by the company’s employees to improve office logistics and make the work atmosphere even more pleasant. With education as the end goal, the project features were designed to cover all the skills needed for a future junior software developer. The students will be working as a team, and together they will have all the freedom to bring their own ideas to life and shape the project the way they agree would be the best. “Every day they have daily standup meetings, and once a week there is sprint planning and sprint retrospective. They also have grooming sessions when necessary, where they discuss potential solutions to some of the obstacles, and they come to conclusions together,” says Milan Pasic, who is assigned as the Project Manager. “At the end of the Internship, the project will be something that is theirs, the result of their own creativity.” To help them achieve this goal the students were assigned mentors, who are medior and senior developers at HTEC and are at their disposal at all times. Together with other colleagues, the mentors are in charge of organizing workshops for the students, introducing them to Git, Scrum, Jira, JWT Authorization, etc.. Besides the hard-skill workshops, the HR team is organizing crash courses in presentation skills, teamwork, and skills of giving and receiving feedback. We asked Milan about his first impressions, and since this is his first year as Project Manager, he was quite enthusiastic and excited about the whole project. “This is a really nice group of guys and girls, with a lot of potential and eagerness to learn. We spotted some great talent already, and are looking forward to working with them.”
“Our goal is to leave room for young and talented people to advance inside the company and grow together with it.”
The students are equally excited, and they all stated that they enjoy that people around the office are positive and the atmosphere is relaxing. “I applied for the Internship to improve my knowledge of iOS, and I see it also as a job opportunity. I expect to learn something new, and I am glad to be working on an interesting real-life project. The mentors are helping us learn how to write better code, and along with it explaining why some things are considered good and some bad practice,” says Dusan Dimic, assigned as an iOS intern. Aleksandra Vujadinovic, who is developing the Android software is seeking for the knowledge needed for her future career while Djurdjina Stojiljkovic, the .NET intern wants to “gain knowledge about the advanced technologies and find out what working in a company looks like.” On the other hand, Marko Vuckovic, who is working in Java, is looking for better time and skill utilization that will help him develop better quality software and he believes HTEC can help him achieve this. Luka Petrovic, working as a front-end developer, is glad to be welcomed by motivated people willing to answer his every question and guide him through each step of the project.
It is important for the students to be involved in the whole project flow and to be present for the design phase as well. When they present their work to colleagues at the end of the Internship, they will have completed the full circle of product development. During the selection process, these five students were given the advantage over the others, because of their technical potential and their ability to cooperate and engage in these processes. What impressed the recruiters was how motivated and diligent they were, and how well they accepted and responded to feedback. These traits are especially important to HTEC and are aligned with the values and the culture the company nurtures.
From the company’s point of view, the Internship program is something that grows along with the company. Year after year HTEC keeps improving the concept with the goal of providing the students with pleasant first work experience and sharing with them a specific set of skills that will help them in their future careers. “From the beginning, we believed that the Internship program is our way of investing in people who still have no experience and are yet to discover their full potential,” says Andjelija Djenic, HR recruiter in charge of organizing the Internship. “At the moment there are more than 10 employees in HTEC who have finished the Internship here in the past few years. Our goal is to leave room for young and talented people to advance inside the company and grow together with it.”
