Girls Day 2022

Girls Day 2022

Girls Day 2022

On April 28, 2022, Girls Day took place again, which is intended to help girls to get a taste of typical "male jobs".

Our Girls Day was a complete success. Female guests between the ages of 11 and 16 who are interested in jobs in the IT industry were invited. The online event in Munich was booked out so quickly that we decided to organize another face-to-face event in Karlsruhe and Münster. All 20 places at the two events were fully booked.

Girls Day 2022

The day started with a short round of introductions and the mood barometer in the online event and a tour of the office in Karlsruhe. The girls were then introduced to what it-economics is all about and in which areas we are active.

In the first interactive slot, the girls were allowed to reveal their ideas about the life of a computer scientist. There are quite a few clichés about this profession and we were able to dispel or even confirm some of them. Above all, the cliché of the solitary programmers who “code” alone in their basements persists.
We responded to all the young women's comments and ideas and explained that professional programming almost always involves working in a team. Socially incompetent people have a very difficult time in IT consulting. With us, software is written by people for people.

The individual professions explained in more detail

We, the organizers, have introduced ourselves in more detail below. We talked about our career and what we do at it-economics. Representing the many different competencies that it-economics bundles, we have explained the role of the backend and frontend developer, scrum master, tester and HR specialist.

  • An HR specialist ensures that the company combines a wide variety of personalities, talents and skills in one company and can therefore provide our customers with competent and interdisciplinary teams for a wide variety of IT projects.
  • A Scrum Master provides peace and time to work in the project teams. She also takes care of removing obstacles so that the project members can focus on the actual tasks. She also controls communication within the team by passing on all the necessary information to the correct recipients.
  • The two developers convert the customer requirements into a software application. The front-end developer primarily ensures that the software looks the way the customer would like it and can be operated intuitively.
    The backend developer is primarily responsible for ensuring that the software provides the functionalities that the customer wants.
  • Last but not least, the tester's task is to compare whether the two developers have actually correctly understood and implemented the customer's requirements. She puts the resulting software through its paces and gives the developers feedback if something isn't running smoothly and needs to be improved.

How does coding work?

After the longer block of introductions, our guests were allowed to try out “programming” themselves. We have this for you Duck racing game presented and explained how the game can be transferred to actual software development. The game is about leading a duck across fields to a goal by combining code blocks with each other. The code blocks correspond to backend modules that other developers on the team had already prepared for us. In order to verify the result, we slip into the role of the tester, run the game and check whether the duck reaches its destination. The young ladies had a lot of fun slipping into the role of developer and tester and mastering their project goals.

Career at it-economics

The final item on our event agenda was Career and Earning Opportunities. It's no secret that you can earn good money in IT. Depending on how rare and in demand the special knowledge of an IT specialist is, the higher the salary. In addition, assuming responsibility is of course a relevant aspect of the salary.

In terms of careers, however, it-economics is special compared to many other companies: We not only preach diversity, we actually live it. At the Karlsruhe location, for example, we currently have a quota of female consultants of almost 30%.
Women are also welcome and represented in our management team. Two of our locations are managed by female location managers. This corresponds to a women's quota of 25%. This ratio is also reflected in the management.
Furthermore, women are supported by an internal initiative to acquire management-relevant soft skills and to network.

After a good two hours in the remote event and around 4 hours in Karlsruhe and Münster, Girls Day 2022 was over. The feedback round was consistently positive. We hope that the participants will get an exciting and interesting insight into the world of work in IT and have taken many positive impressions with them.

Catherine Black

author

Catherine Black
Senior Developer