WHY TECH?

When I graduated in 2013 I never ever imagined to start my career in IT – not even a single second. I pictured myself in a (digital) marketing department at a dynamic company such as Nike or continue my career at an (international) advertising agency because that’s the industry that I started to do my internships while still studying for my Uni degree.

I excluded the possibility to work in the Tech industry entirely, thinking that jobs in this market should be something really high-tech and maybe, just maybe even a tiny bit dull. Why would I possibly want to be part of the old farts team? Or so I thought.

It’s actually a bit of a controversial thought because I grew up with a father working with supercomputers and my mother working for technology companies too. My father is into the latest flashy gadgets (TV’s, DSLR cameras and its accessoires, etc), the latest game consoles and building our own computers. I loved gaming either on the self-build computers or with the Nintendo or xbox. I still secretely love playing Halo!

I can continue about my fascinating child-hood tech memories for hours, so maybe I’ll write a blog post about that some day. Let’s get back to the topic: WHY TECH?

Moving forward to 2013, after graduation I could still feel the aftershocks of the economic recession: the abundance of graduates looking for jobs next to the people that had no job and already having (some) work experience. The two main reasons I was declined during the +/- 10 interviews that I had were: “We have another candidate with 1 or 2 more years experience” (graduate positions require work experience?) or “You are too ambitious for our company”.

The latter reason really demotivated me. How can someone be too ambitious? Isn’t it rightfully so that as a graduate you’re just uber-enthusiastic to get your hands on the first job? Also, if someone pro-actively works hard to grow in his or her career and the opportunities are given by the company then why would this person leave? Next to this all, give me endless challenges that will keep me busy and I’m forever loyal – I promise.

Have no pity for the young graduate that I was (22 years old), because this launched me into a sales career in Tech. No regrets – at all. I wish I’d known that working for a Tech (focused) company is the best that could ever happen to you much sooner! To sum up a couple of my personal reasons WHY TECH? and why you should want to work for a Tech company:

They embrace your ambitions.
They motivate you to personally develop yourself.
They trigger your curiosity in all the technologies that they develop – let’s be honest, most of the Tech-stuff is actually really cool. Especially when you give it a better thought and think of what time and effort is put into it.
They give back to the community, not only in terms of donations, but also supporting customers to do research and development better and faster. Or better said: serving you as an end-user at their best – making the world more intelligent and safer.
The Tech industry offers you (almost endless) career opportunities to grow in your career: technical roles, but also lots of non-technical roles such as: Sales, Project Management, Purchasing, Logistics, Finance, HR, and so forth.
Often pays very well. Not entirely unimportant – you don’t want to live on a minimum loan after investing money, time and effort into your studies for years, now do you?
Tech will always be at the core of everything that we do in business and when we enjoy our time together with family and friends. That compact-easy-to-use tent which you set up in a forest by a lake far away from civilization, is also developed to your needs and manufactured using the latest development and technologies. You can’t escape from it.

What else would you possibly want more than being in the front-end of the latest technologies to make products and services better and safer? How cool is it that you know, way before innovations reach the mass market, that this innovative product or service will improve the quality of life from that of yourself and others? I find it pretty awesome!

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— Samira