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Bold, ambitious, modern and high tech—that’s how Bart Wetselaar and his team at Xccelerated describe the company that grew out of Xebia. “We’re a healthy mix between fun and serious, leaning just a bit more towards the serious side,” Bart smiles. But how does this ambitious, friendly, and fun-loving business empower young IT professionals to take their careers even further? Let’s let them tell the story.
Bart Wetselaar, chief Xccelerator:
“There’s an enormous demand for highly-skilled young professionals —data scientists and data engineers with one to three years of experience So, Xccelerated bridges that gap by fostering and mentoring a select group of promising and ambitious IT juniors into Xccelerators who add value to their data science and data engineering projects right from the start.
Michiel Kroon van Diest, business development lead:
“We help the young professionals grow, and we also help our clients grow, by injecting them with Xebia’s signature brand of culture and knowledge-sharing. Our own technical leads, Matthijs & Emanuel, shaped our programs in data science and data engineering (DS/DE) together with senior colleagues from Xebia and GoDataDriven. Our main goal is to help our partner organizations grow their competencies in the fields of DS/DE in a sustainable way. Aligned with the Xebia vision, we are going for ‘quality without compromise.’ This promise has been integrated into each specific component of the Xccelerated program.”
Samantha Goncalves, talent acquisition lead
“We start twice a year with classes of six participants per specialism: data science and data engineering. Then, in the first month, participants go through a full-time boot camp training to increase their starting level. During the boot camp, the focus is mostly on building up their technical skills. The new Xccelerators need to have confidence in their technical knowledge to start working on a project right away. And besides needing the technical part, we want people who really have a passion for data and share that passion with other people within the group. That feeling of passion needs to be there.”
Mahlia Joenoes, talent manager:
“The last component, personal development training, or ‘soft skills,’ lasts through the year. The personal development part is very important when you're a young professional because it's more focused on things like dealing with resistance in a big company, giving and receiving feedback, as well as improving your presentation skills. Sometimes you just have to sell your data knowledge to either management or colleagues that don't know as much about data as you do. We have all kinds of people, but there's one very funny thing that we say about the what makes someone a potential Xccelerator— at the end of the day, we want to be able to drink a beer with them as well.”
