The path to a career in IT can begin when you discover your passion for programming, even as early as high school. The key moment that can mark the beginning of a career in technology is when you take your first steps into this field.
How do you know if you have a "calling" for technology? You discover it once you step into the world of programming and start working with IT elements. Mirela Lupu is a Senior Program Manager at Adobe, and she sponsors the Technovation Girls Romania program.
She shared with us the moment when she chose to pursue a degree in Cybernetics, Statistics, and Economic Informatics and then to work in tech, in a role where technology and business come together to function harmoniously.
How "tech" can a career in tech be?
Last year, Harvard Business Review stated that the number of jobs in tech will grow exponentially in the coming years. As we move towards the future, the labor market is adapting, giving rise to new jobs, innovative work styles, and novel solutions for emerging challenges.
The same publication mentions that the great constant of the tech industry is change. As technology infiltrates more and more fields, the spectrum of IT jobs expands. On the "technical" side, jobs can take forms such as programmer, data engineer, digital platform engineer, data modeler, data analyst, or even software architect.
There are also jobs where creativity has a well-defined role or where technology is used as a support for business activities.
Creativity is the key element in the Technovation Girls Romania program, where high school students choose to address a real community issue through a solution entirely conceived by them, such as an application that requests and provides information to solve that challenge or an artificial intelligence system that considers all relevant aspects of the problem.
With the support of mentors, the girls choose how that application will look, what messages the user will see, and what the project's name will be to make it as appealing as possible to the judges.
High school education can be the starting point of a career
Mirela Lupu is a Senior Program Manager. She began studying technology in college, but she believes that you can consider a career in tech even during high school.
We invite you to watch this inspirational material, and if you are a parent, you can share it with your child, especially if they haven't yet discovered the career direction they want to pursue.
A starting point can also be to watch together the progress of participants in Technovation Girls Romania, see which projects stand out, and even get to know the girls who developed one of the top applications from the previous edition.
