<aside> ❗ Read this first

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If you want to really dive into finding your motivation and go the extra mile then make this additional assignment to get more insight into your future potential job. In November there will be a we are in IT together conference giving you more insight into the professional IT environment. But you will first try and find a “role model” company which peaks your interest and helps with investigating your study motivation. The results of the research done will be processed in a blog post on your website.

As you may already know, there is no such thing as the IT professional job. As an undergraduate IT professional you have many options to choose from in the IT field. Those options can be categorized into:

1. Choice of organization: area of business, size, and mission.
2. Choice of function: general and/or specialist in a specific role as developer or security expert.
3. Choice of technical field: web, apps, enterprise applications, data science, etc.

Almost every organization has to deal with some form of IT. That is why the job market for an IT-professional is huge. You can work in many different areas after graduating. For mid-term decisions it is important to get a more detailed understanding of the IT field and possibilities. It will help you to make the right choices for  study specialization, your minor and internship. For short term, this study year, it is important to find out as much as you can to help you decide if this is the right study for you and stay motivated.

Assignments on Research

<aside> 🛠 Exercise 5.1: First recall your written who am I form motivation. It might give you some idea where to start your search for IT companies. For instance if you like gaming, you might want to find out about companies in that area. If you like program languages look for software engineering companies. Write down some search words that you can type in your favorite search engine to find IT companies. Examples are: Software engineering, Data Science, Business and IT, Gaming, Cyber security, C#, JavaScript etc. Combine these search words to find better results and combine them with the word “Company” and an area where you would like to work (Netherlands, UK etc.) see what results the search engine presents you. Of Course when searching Dutch companies translating these into Dutch words will also help.

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<aside> 🛠 Exercise 5.2: Select from the found results three companies of interest. In other words companies you would want to work for. Maybe you already have a role model company in mind. Like wanting to work for Microsoft or Google.

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<aside> 🛠 Exercise 5.3: Now with those three selected companies gather more detailed information about them. Visit their websites and read the information. What you want to look out for is the following:

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• What type of projects / work do they do?
• What IT technology do they work with?
• How big are they in numbers of staff? (Small business, multinational etc.)
• What do they tell you about there company culture?
• Do they operate international,
• what different job descriptions do they have.

You can use different sources to find you information. Youtube channels to get an impression of culture and technology or projects they work on. linkedIn.com for the vacancies and jobs they have or through a  job offer page of the website (Dutch intermediair) or https://www.stepstone.com/en/solutions/jobseeker/

<aside> 🛠 Exercise 5.4: If you have gathered enough information on the company next see if you can find out about job specifics. What would for instance a data scientist do? or a software engineer verus a Business and IT consultant. This will help you for chosing a track in the future

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