Why Sber?

We've decided to start our «Meet the employer» column with Sber (formerly branded as Sberbank). Sber is Russia's most technologically advanced company, Skoltech's founding member, our key strategic partner and company with lots of internship and career opportunities for Skoltech graduates. Enjoy the reading and feel free to ask Sber colleagues your questions during their presentation on October 26.

First of all, when entering a job market you need to evaluate the market.
It's important to gather information about the demand for your profession nowadays, the employers' requirements for applicants, and what salary you might expect. We highly recommend looking at RBC, Forbes, Vedomosti, HBR, Rusbase.

To plan your career trajectory effectively, you first need to determine your professional goal – and answer this important question: what job do you want to find? You can start by making a list of your requirements regarding the future employer or the job format. Here is a detailed checklist of things to consider:

• What industry do you want to work in?
• What size should the company be?
• International or Russian (it may directly affect your career development and relocation)?
• What responsibilities do you want and what kind of projects would you like to manage?
• What opportunities for growth / development / training within the company do you find interesting?
• What format / schedule is appropriate?
• What is the corporate culture?
• Is there a dress code?
• What is the income level?
• What kind of benefits package is offered?

After answering these questions you can move to the next step – constructing your resume. There is an important life hack – construct a resume for each particular job opening. This means focusing on the skills required for the specific job.

We distinguish between several types of skills: hard skills, soft skills and digital skills

Hard skills. Competencies in demand in banks nowadays are:

1. Working with data (SQL, VBA, Python);
2. Predictive analytics;
3. Knowledge of programming languages Java/Javascript/Python and knowledge of frameworks (for example, Spring);
4. Knowledge of agile methodology, which is used not only in development teams;
5. Knowledge of design thinking methodology and the ability to apply it in solving work problems.

Soft skills. Development of these skills is much more important for your career, your success in life and, most importantly, for your happiness.

1. Social skills. Communication: collaboration, public speaking, discussing, conveying your opinion. Everything that enables us to interact in a team and succeed in communication.
2. Cognitive skills that determine our consistency from the point of view of the thought process. Systematic thinking is extremely important, including analysis and synthesis.
3. Creativity is an important skill for creating new products and processes.
4. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, process information, structure it and make a conclusion.
5. And, as a consequence, a strategically important skill is decision making.
6. Emotional intelligence, self management, understand your and others' emotions in order to succeed in communication.

The information about soft skills was taken from G.O. Gref's interview.

Digital skills. The new technological revolution ("Fourth Industrial Revolution") leads to the spread of digital technologies, where the use of AI, robotics, VR and other innovations has a powerful impact on the nature of learning and work. Digitalization of the economy leads to deeper penetration of technology into the work environment and personal space of every person.

The essential quality of this new era is digital literacy, which includes the personal, technical and intellectual (digital) skills that are necessary to live in a digital world. By digital skills we mean established, automated behavior patterns based on knowledge and skills in the use of digital devices, communication apps and networks to access and control the information. Digital skills enable people to create and share digital content, communicate and solve problems for effective and creative fulfillment in learning, work and social activities in general.

To find a job, the following factors are important:

Step 1. Understanding your professional goal. Determine the requirements for the future employer, areas for development, etc.

Step 2. Self-evaluation. To understand where you want to develop, it is important to understand what brings you pleasure and what you do well. An honest conversation with yourself is essential here.

At this stage it's good to ask yourself several questions: Where am I right now and where I want to go? What is my dream future? What makes me stand out? What do I like to do mostly? What awesome achievements do I have and what allowed me to accomplish them? What failures did I have, and which characteristics prevented me from accomplishing my desire? Which strengths and weaknesses do I have?

It often happens that even after graduating from university students don't develop their self-vision. In this case we recommend students to spend more time exploring their needs and goal setting. For example:

• Complete online tests, such as Edgar Schein's "Career Anchors" – a test for determining one's value system, social settings, interests and so on or the five-factor personality test 5PFQ, Golomstock's "Map of Interests" – a test for determining main interests.
• Get expert advice from a career consultant. Career consultants help you to set your goal, to evaluate the job market and to plan job-seeking actions.

Step 3. Plan job-seeking actions. A concise list of actions might look like this:

1. Determining a list of companies of interest and finding vacancies of interest.
2. Composing a resume for a particular vacancy (on our web portal there are awesome articles, which may help you in this )
3. Finding channels where companies may post vacancies (apart from hh.ru there are job telegram channels, companies' career group on social media, careers fairs and other career events, forums and conferences, where companies' representatives speak and so on) and send your resume or to speak face to face with company representatives.
4. Preparing for the interview.

Here it is important not to be upset if you are rejected. Often a company or team selects candidates not only for their knowledge, but for how they fit the corporate culture and team spirit.

The year was complicated, but for a large organization we transformed our processes considerably quickly in order to switch over to distance work. Our successful work format transformation and setting of necessary accesses enables us to continue hiring interns and hiring in general. In some way, we got an unexpected bonus – the opportunity to work at a distance.

In the last couple of months, the job market has changed drastically and will never be the same again. We are confident that Skoltech graduates and students (hey, that's you!) are 100% ready to face these global changes, competition and remote work. use this guide to prepare for the job hunt — from writing a resume to passing a video interview with a top manager. Click to learn more.