On n'est jamais tout seul.

Geert Dreuning

Sogeti Pays-Bas, Ingénieur de développement
logiciel

My first acquaintance with Sogeti couldn’t have started in a more impressive way. They made a presentation at my college during the Careers Orientation weeks and I was sold right from the beginning. I was studying Information Technology and there were plenty of opportunities to find a suitable job in the industry. Capgemini, Ordina, Atos/Origin, LogicaCMG - the big players were all very eager to get young potential recruits onboard. As a student, you were spoilt for choice.

What persuaded me towards Sogeti - I wasn’t quite able to identify it at the time, but, with the benefit of hindsight and my working experience what I realize now - was the overall feeling I got that there was more to Sogeti than just the job. Of course there was the passion and the sense of pride that came through from Sogeti’s presentation, but the other companies had that too. And of course, once on board, all the companies promised that you would have a great career in front of you, and job security and a good salary and perks.

But Sogeti felt different.

I felt that, while other companies put the emphasis on their business excellence, their standing in the market, their list of clients and their achievements in terms of budgets and turnover, Sogeti was talking substance and content. Sogeti talked IT, about all those fantastic opportunities you could create with it and how everything within the Sogeti organization was geared towards that goal, the way they worked and invested in their people with training and courses. That was ‘corn on my mill’, as we say in Holland. On top of that – and this was not exactly unimportant – was that the Sogeti people showed a great interest in our graduation project.

So right after my graduation, and after passing an admission test, I was invited to join Sogeti with the prospect of becoming a programmer. I was sent on a 3-week course, High Performance Teaming, in Ohio. There I was further instilled with the Sogeti culture. We had expert instructors, people with a proven track record in the business. We learned to tackle problems on both the IT side and the business side.

And we learned to co-operate, how to make use of the Sogeti organization, its vast knowledge, the specialist networks and the Sogeti Intranet. It was a tremendous experience that completely justified my choice.

After the induction, I was put to the test straight away on various assignments on customers’ sites.

I learned not only to apply my skills as a programmer and member of a team of J2EE developers, but also to understand the importance of having a good relationship with the customer and to comprehend his business. You have to know what his problem is in order to come up with a solution.

The great thing about Sogeti is that we have this big network of knowledgeable and experienced colleagues to turn to. If things really get complicated, I know that I can put the problem on the Intranet and there will always be somebody in the organization who has an answer or a solution. I mean, you are your own man, and of course it’s your responsibility to crack the problem and come up with a solution that’s in the customer’s interest. But at Sogeti, you never walk alone. You can always call on colleagues for help and assistance; that’s most reassuring, it gives you confidence.

At the moment, I am a team leader on my biggest project so far, building a website for one of the biggest travel agencies in the Netherlands, with 170 travel shops all over the country. It’s quite a complicated and important job. It entails development from scratch: design, product information, the set-up of reservation, booking and payment systems, implementation of the payment module, testing the whole thing from end to end. I am working on the client’s site with a team of client staff and Sogeti colleagues in an energetic and upbeat atmosphere.

It’s like we have known each other for years. There’s a real bond.

I’m also in close contact with the lead on the client side and with my project leader. So everybody is involved. That’s the way I like it.

Being a part of something is very important to me as a person. The feeling that you belong. I have lived all my 27 years in a small village in the Wieringermeer polder in the north of Holland that was reclaimed from the sea 80 years ago. The people there still know the values and virtues of a community. At Sogeti, I recognize a similar type of unity.