31 January 2014

On January 28, 2014 the Hi-Tech Park Administration held a final project defense for the trainees of the HTP Educational Center for the 4th time. As for the results of the 3 first specialized courses of Development Practice, which completed in May, June, and November 2013, about 90% of the HTP Educational Center graduates have jobs by now.

This time, 4 team projects were presented to the expert committee. The 4 teams included 38 trainees of the following educational programs: Java Developer, Ruby Developer, Front-End Developer, Software Testing Engineer, and Business Analyst. Under the guidance of experienced practitioners, the trainees had been developing one of the HRMS-INFO modules for 2.5-3 months.

What is Development Practice?

The specialized course Development Practice was initiated by the HTP Educational Center in February, 2013. It is already well-known and popular.

Ivan Spresov: "On the basis of the Educational Center in the field of information technology, we decided to create a project that could stimulate a working process in a real IT-company. During the internship, students do not just write the product working in their discipline, they constantly communicate, interact, and create something quite real. And there is another very valuable outcome of this joint effort which cannot be bought for any money – teamwork. That is the uniqueness of the program Development Practice. To this end, we form mixed project teams for this purpose. As a result, not only the level of training increases; students also gain experience of working on real projects – the experience of working with people and technology, the experience of time management and coordination of interactions, the experience of responsibility to the colleagues. After that it will be easier for them to adapt to a real company, they will be able to engage in the working process quickly and efficiently and start building their own career".

Experts view

The level of training and the format of the defense again received high praise from the experts who are traditionally representatives of the Hi-Tech Park resident-companies.

Irina Gurina, Itransition: "Due to the participation in the final project defense held by the Educational Center, we get the opportunity not only to evaluate the level of training of todays young specialists, but also to single out the brightest graduates before anyone else can do this and make a job offer. It is definitely interesting and our company is ready to participate in such meetings in the future."

Elena Shmidova, EPAM Systems: "This time, the project defense was interesting and significant. The performance of each team member helps companies representatives evaluate not only technical knowledge, but also their public speaking skills. Thanks to the presentations, we were able to immediately identify the students we would like to collaborate with and contacted them the next day .."