An inside look at Tarja’s and Antti’s work

How does it feel like to work as an expert in a long-term engagement for a major client of Capgemini? What does the everyday work look like?

We caught up with Antti Ollilainen and Tarja Holopainen from Capgemini Finland to talk about their specific engagements in one of our key accounts. Both are currently involved full time in application development and management for one of the leading pension sector companies in Finland. While Antti is a configuration management expert and DevOps support specialist in continuous service delivery, Tarja is an application specialist in an application management team. Together with 68 team members they make sure that they have fun learning on the job. Let’s take a closer look at how their careers have shaped over time and where they are headed.

Interestingly, while Antti, a graduate from the University of Lappeenranta already had an IT background when he joined Capgemini in 2011, Tarja’s foray into IT began in 2017 with Capgemini, where she joined via career reorientation program after graduating in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki. We were curious to know if they would recommend their field of work to prospective job seekers and here is what they had to say.

A typical day in our team

A day at work for us is seldom typical. Since we offer project delivery, minor enhancements, testing and implementation – the whole gamut of services – it is never a mundane moment.

Well, for starters, we are managing business-critical applications, which gives us end-to-end experience in full stack development. What we do, indirectly influences an important socio-economic aspect of our senior citizens’ lives. So we have a sense of responsible pride in what we do. We are a close knit team of 70 spread across Finland, India and France with separate squads for tools and configuration management, DevOps Support, application server support, additional service, testing and maintenance. But at the end of the day, we are ONE team, part of the big client family – and not just in theory. We do not have that onshore/offshore divide in the way we work or feel about our work. Everyone is equally important in the team.

Due to the necessary cautiousness in handling critical data, things can run a bit slow here. Technologies vary from legacy systems to more avant-garde expertise. We are leading the work all the time to more agile direction for speed but sometimes “patience is an underrated virtue in IT” – is one of our big learnings toward driving excellence

Team spirit and fun are important  

Our team spirit is infectiously friendly and the opportunity to learn hands-on is also immense. Support from senior members is always available to the newly joined employees, with both general and specialized inductions in place when one is on-boarded. Our orientation is carried out with meticulous planning by a phased access to document repositories, client systems, cloud work stations along with a systematic knowledge transfer in standard templates. There are role specific onboarding as well for business analysts, coders and developers according to their respective background and needs. We remember how we were asked to introduce ourselves at our orientation and realized how everyone was trying to make us feel comfortable on our first day at work. Seems like yesterday!

Our voice is also being heard. Senior management collects our expectations regarding our role and tasks and we do an assessment how well our expectations have been met in terms or actual career outcomes.

When it comes to having fun at work, it is an important aspect of our work. In addition to Capgemini’s joint events for all employees like Inspiration Breaks, Christmas and summer parties etc., we have our own get-togethers with the client team. For example we have enjoyed together a daytrip to Estonia and an Escape room experience.

Learning every day…

The client has a wide technology stack. Applications used here range from main frames to new Java-based apps running in private cloud.  We offer consultation around maintenance, incidents, and additional service ideas and propose new tools to the client. We have the freedom to recommend what needs to be done differently. The level of knowledge about client systems as well as upcoming technology is high in this account. And though the learning curve is steep, before you even notice you are an expert in your field. The client also values our Testing and Quality Assessments skills and has confidence in us.

Do you want to join this team?

We are looking to grow our team with more technical experts this year. So yes, we would really like to encourage developers and tech leads to reach out and check if this could be the right fit for your career prospects! Check our open positions in our Career pages and apply for the positions of “Application Specialist” or “Tech Lead” to join Antti’s and Tarja’s team!