The final hours

Onnellista uutta vuotta!

We have reached the final week of our amazing journey and everyone is extremely pepped up to take the final stage. Things are looking good for the final pitching event to be held tomorrow i.e. 12 Jan. The last three months have been spent in preparation for this one event and everyone is keeping their fingers crossed.

Burni has been actively collaborating from Austria since his exchange term in Tampere came to an end in December.

From Austria, with love.

The entire team is thankful for the encouragement and mentoring from our dear facilitator Raul who has been cheering us on all through. The support and keen ear provided by folks at Eatech has been very instrumental for us to reach this point.

All the best to all the teams!

 

Team meeting (Part vii) and Project partner meeting

The latest team meeting was held on 29th of November. The entire team met again at New Factory and spent the evening discussing the operationality of the tool. Burni and Tamas have been working hard on the coding aspect for the past couple of weeks and have come up with brilliant design and functionalities. The tool is coming along well with constant additions and subtractions and we are keeping our hopes up that we have the final version soon. After the meeting a very interesting and entertaining feedback activity was done with one of the Demola faclitators, Ohad .

Tamas and Burni working hard on their pose

The team is looking forward to the Pitching workshop which is being held on Thurs, 8 Dec at New Factory. This would be a helpful tool for the final pitching that is the next major event for us.

The meeting with the project partner was held on 1st of December. Elli couldn’t join us because of some important work commitments however, the show must go on. The rest of the team met with Sunnu and discussed about the tool, its further improvement and some more ideas about job fairs in general. The meeting was short and productive.

 

IT-Hekuma & Mid-Pitching Event

On 16th of November, the much awaited IT-Hekuma took place at TUT. It was bustling with eager students and scores of IT companies looking for prospective candidates, at the same time promoting their brand and handing out free goodies. It was a good opportunity to walk around the fair to observe how different company stands actually operate and to monitor corresponding student reactions. The entire team got together and went from stand to stand to take note of minute details that make a company stand out in such events.

We got an opportunity to finally meet Eatech’s recruiting manager Sanna, who usually works remotely from Spain and was visiting Tampere for IT-Hekuma. Since it was a busy day for Eatech at the fair, we had a quick round of introductions and then a short chat discussing about areas of improvement and career fairs in general.

17th of November was a very exciting day for the smartcareerexpo team as it was the day of the first major pitching event conducted at New Factory. Burni proved to be a very confident and effective speaker and made a rather good 3 minute pitch. Some feedback was received from the audience which was in fact very helpful and will help us enhance our final pitch (to be held on 12.1.2017).

Burni during the mid pitch event

 

Team meeting (Part vi)

Another day well spent at New factory premises. Preparations are in full swing for the mid pitch event on thursday. The team worked on the overall presentation while giving a demo presentation in the presence of different demola facilitators. Valuable feedback from them helped to polish the presentation further. A special thanks to Raul and Yuliya.

As can be clearly seen from the picture below, the guys have been working really hard on the presentation (Coffee and Burni’s smile seem to be helping).

Another event is IT Hekuma tomorrow, which the team is going to attend to get some more feedback for their prototype and design. There is also some more progress on the prototype which will be presented in the next meeting with the project partner (24.11.16)

And look what we have here from Demola,

Looking forward to the upcoming exciting rest of the week.

Team meeting (part v) and Project partner meeting

The team had their weekly meeting on 8th of november at the New factory. Elli and Ira had been brainstorming over some creative job fair ideas for the company stand (over breakfast) and then discussed those with Tamas and Burni in the meeting late afternoon. Some positive and constructive feedback helped to polish those ideas further so as to be presented to the project partner in the upcoming meeting.

Some work was also done on the preparation for the mid pitch which is approaching us soon. The team seems pretty enthusiastic about it and has been receiving constant guidance from Raul about new ideas and approaches to the actual pitching event.

For the meeting with the project partner on 11th november, the new and improved version of the prototype was presented. Some feedback and ideas were taken into consideration for the next version. The ideas for the stand design and methods to improve the personal user experience for target audience were put across. It looks like a work in progress for now but should have some more concrete form soon.

The team is now preparing for the mid pitch event and also to attend the recruitment event IT-Hekuma taking place on 16.11.2016. It would be a good experience to go to ground zero and see how things work.

Demola Jam and Team Meeting (Part iv)

It has been an eventful week for the entire team. 29th of october, on a saturday morning the team made it to Jam #2 at New Factory. It turned out to be a very productive and interactive day in terms of team building and knowledge sharing.

Various workshops were conducted by the Demola team for all project teams and their members which further helped the teams to enhance their basic skills like elevator pitching, creating presentations, team spirit and understanding more intricate aspects of their project like user experience design, project manager responsibilities, sustainability and more.

Another team meeting took place on 1st of November where some major discussions took place about the student validation interviews that were conducted in the week before. While Tamas and Ira visited TUT to conduct interviews with target students, Elli and Burni conducted individual interviews in Finnish and English respectively at UTA. The results were more or less in sync with the extrapolation the team had done beforehand, with very little room for surprises. Certain characteristic differences were however noticed in the responses the teams recieved from Finnish and international students. The next plan to formulate the data collected into a more structured format was created.

Another major agenda for discussion was the mid pitching event that is coming soon on 17.11.2016. The team brainstormed about the basic outline of their 3 minute pitch and came up with some very creative ideas co-efficiently. Further more, the prototype has been been refined to the next stage and will be presented in the project partner meeting scheduled for 11.11.2016.

At the end of the long meeting the team decided to grab some beers over some pleasant conversations where Elli was missed.

Team Meeting- Part iii

Today, the team met again at the New Factory. With Bernie back from his Russian getaway, the team got into full action mode and brainstormed the next steps.

 

Bernie and Elli debating some issues while Tamas is updating his calendar for friday’s meeting with Ira

We have divided ourselves into groups of two each in order to visit the universities in Tampere and get some feedback from our target audience i.e. university students about our initial prototype. There is a list of pre discussed questions that was prepared in the meeting  (after some serious brainstorming), that is going to be used for student interviews. The questions range from general feedback about experience in job fairs to some specific details about our prototype. The interviews are to be conducted within this week and the results will be assimilated together soon after to get a clearer picture of the ground reality and also to enhance what we already have.

Some valuable suggestions and valid concerns from our facilitator Raul and our project partner Sunnu (from the previous meeting) have been taken into account while preparing for the student interviews. We are very optimistic that this first test will help us improve the product in manifold ways.

Presenting the first prototype

Last Friday we met at Eatech’s office to present our first “real” prototype. While Elli and Ira were super busy with their exams, Tamas had been working hard and crafted an amazing, nice-looking prototype with some basic functionality.

The prototype helped us discuss some essential features and choices in the UI. With this prototype, we can now also easily demonstrate our tool to its potential end users (i.e. our fellow students) and get feedback from them.

Some choices in the UI turned out to be controversial – we had quite a long discussion about primary and secondary buttons and some other UI and technical details. Once again, we’ll know a lot more after interviewing the end users for real time validation. There were some detailed discussions about branding and presentation of the interface and other specifics like the use of individual pictures for representation purposes during the actual events.

Our agenda for the upcoming week is to meet students from different universities and fields and test and validate the initial prototype with them in a real-time environment.

Team meeting- Part ii

On October 11, the team gathered at the New factory premises for another team meeting. This meeting was to brainstorm the ideas for further development in terms of the entire conceptual design.

 

Burni, Tamas and Elli concentrating on the agenda.

 

We discussed about the possible names for our product and examined various options, some of them were pretty funny and hence, thrown out immediately. However, some ideas were solid.

The main motive for today’s meeting was to conceptually go through the recruitment process after we insert our product into it and the changes that it will manifest, step by step. This helped us to visualize the actual process from different perspectives and so it was a day well spent.

A visit to Eatech and the Playbook meeting

Early on Friday morning three of us visited Eatech’s office in Hervanta. We met the HR and Communications Manager, Hanna, to discuss about their recruiting process and career fairs in general. We were all feeling hopeful after the discussion – feels like we’re on the right track!

Elli also met her friend for a short interview about what it’s like to apply for a job at Eatech. The said friend, by chance, applied for her job by visiting Eatech at a career fair, so she has exactly the first-hand experience that we’re interested in.

Suvi from Eatech and Tamas listening attentively

On Friday afternoon we gathered at the new factory for our Playbook Meeting. We went through the Playbook with these question cards, which really sparked conversation and even led to some new ideas.

We were also proud to present a sort of a “shitty prototype”, i.e. the sketches we made last time. The sketches helped us to demonstrate the basic functionality of our tool (our initial idea), and we got some valuable feedback from the project partner and our facilitator Raúl.

Bernie presenting our sketches

For now, we are making good progress and hopefully we should have our first prototype ready soon.