Entry-level jobs offer challenge in
a range of industries, from energy
to finance

Advancing technologies keep a growing workforce on its toes

The industry seeks women and minorities to increase diversity in the field

By Laura Gater
Contributing Editor

The drive for diversity is especially beneficial to the CS and software engineering sectors, which are often tied to global business initiatives. Companies are enthusiastic about developing entry-level talent and look to recruit people with a variety of backgrounds, interests and knowledge.

Elizabeth Marshall, HR director for information technology at JCPenney Co, Inc (Plano, TX), says that the company is always looking for high-performing candidates in areas like applications engineering, systems engineering, IT operations and IT management.

JCPenney requires that all 155,000 of its associates, including company leadership, participate in inclusion and diversity training.

“In an ever-changing workforce, JCPenney recognizes that it’s vital to recruit people from all lifestyles, cultures, backgrounds and perspectives,” says Marshall. “That’s why we’ve increased our presence at diversity-focused events and on college campuses.”

Jumping on the diversity bandwagon
“Business success demands that we develop our intern- and entry-level employees to the best of our ability, no matter their gender, age, race, preference or background,” notes Tomas Rivera, director of diversity strategy for Walgreens (Deerfield, IL). “Diversity and respect are at the top of our mission statement: We will treat each other with respect and dignity and do the same for all we serve. We will offer employees of all backgrounds a place to build careers.”

JPMorgan Chase (New York, NY) is also committed to building an inclusive work environment where everyone has a chance to thrive and succeed, says Christine Larsen, executive vice president, banking operations and technology. “Diverse perspectives and ‘diversity of mind’ are critical for solving complex problems in global business. Through partnerships with universities and colleges we actively recruit top diverse candidates for our technology area and across the firm.”

ADP (Roseland, NJ) appreciates the benefits of a diverse workforce as well, and embraces the many dimensions of each of its associates. “It is through our commitment to inclusiveness that we are able to provide all our associates with access to resources and opportunities,” explains Clyde Jones, VP and chief diversity officer. “That’s of great value to them, and helps us maintain our dynamic leadership in the IT field.”

At Prudential Financial, Inc (Newark, NJ), “Diversity requirements are built into business and human resources processes. The company holds leadership accountable for creating an environment where every employee has an opportunity to succeed and where diversity is integrated into the fabric of our business,” according to Emilio Egea, vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer.

The IT pros interviewed for this story know firsthand that diversity in the workplace can be a rewarding situation for all.

Walgreens’ Susmita Chowdhury: high-level project management

Susmita Chowdhury has been a full-time system support analyst for Walgreens (Deerfield, IL) since October 2007. She works in Walgreens’ corporate project management office, which provides administrative frameworks and develops tools and metrics for a variety of applications. Chowdhury’s responsibility is to collect support requests for the company’s Planview application. Planview is a high-level project management tool that will soon be piloted throughout the company.

“I work on process problems and new requirements using Planview. I’m also responsible for administering the Planview system and related business objects reporting elements,” she says. “My days involve both business and IT work. I’m on a technical team of four, using cutting-edge tools to solve problems.”

Chowdhury grew up in Pennsylvania after she came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1995. Her parents insisted that she attend college, so she started as a biology major at Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), but she’d always been interested in IT. She took some computer classes and ultimately transferred to DeVry University (Chicago, IL) and changed her major to CIS.

Chowdhury graduated from DeVry with a BS in 2003 and is currently finishing an MS in business information technology at DePaul University (Chicago, IL).

In college Chowdhury worked at Shuchona Corporation (Chicago, IL) as an administrative assistant, providing technical software support and maintaining a database using MS Access and SQL. That experience helped her land an internship at Walgreens in 2007. She updated content on Walgreens’ website, designed Web-based forms on the store’s intranet using HTML and Perl/CGI script, and developed and designed web screens using Javascript and XML.

During her internship Chowdhury was mentored by her team manager, who taught her about corporate culture, answered her questions, and helped her make day-to-day decisions in her job. Now Chowdhury herself is a mentor to her younger family members and advises them about college and career planning.

Chowdhury felt that being a female in IT was most difficult right after her college graduation, when the IT market took a downturn and jobs were harder to find. She enjoys the diverse atmosphere at Walgreens and would like to build her career there.

“In the short run I want to advance in project management,” she says. “I want to successfully manage projects that will have positive impacts on the company.”

Anand Vaneswaran: architecture specialist at Prudential

Anand Vaneswaran grew up in Bangalore, India and emigrated with his family to Lawrenceville, NJ, where he attended high school. When it was time to choose a college major, he opted for IT at Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY). He graduated with a BS in 2007.

Now Vaneswaran is an architecture specialist at Prudential Financial (Newark, NJ). He is on a team of seven responsible for keeping up the infrastructure for the delivery of desktops and applications to internal Prudential customers. The team also maintains servers at the data center and conducts R&D in a variety of areas. An offshore team in Ireland backs them up.

Prudential has many different business areas, Vaneswaran says, and not everyone needs or uses the same software applications. “Right now I’m still learning the ropes.”

As part of Vaneswaran’s college graduation requirements, he had to do three internships. Prudential was his third, during the summer of 2007. He was a systems engineer in the virtualization engineering group of the systems engineering department. His job responsibilities included evaluating emerging technologies in thin client computing, providing tier three production support for the enterprise Citrix environment, researching and developing proof of concept environments related to remote applications, and implementing desktop delivery of new technologies.

His two previous internships were at Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs,
Murray Hill, NJ) in the summers of 2005 and 2006. There he prepared executive reports
and summaries for daily and weekly status calls, built and updated business spreadsheets,
and trained Lucent associates on tools for tracking various business events and processes.

“The first two internships at Lucent exposed me to the corporate environment,” he says.
“I didn’t really use my IT skills until I interned at Prudential, where I actually worked on technical projects.”

His team at Prudential is very diverse. Its members “come from everywhere” around the world. At his college the IT majors were also a diverse group.

Vaneswaran is taking his career one step at a time. “I would like to get more job experience, then go back to school for an MBA while I continue working at Prudential. It’s not my nature to look too far ahead, but it would be nice to become an IT executive some day.”

Nicole Lee is a business analyst for JPMorgan Chase
Nicole Lee is a business analyst in the private bank information technology department at JPMorgan Chase (New York, NY). She’s had the job since July 2005. It was her first position after graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY), where she earned
a BS in IT.

Lee remembers begging to take a computer maintenance class in high school. All of the other students were male, but she wanted to learn how to build a computer. She was ultimately admitted to the course. “That was really the start of my career,” she says.

She credits internships at Empire State Development Corp (New York, NY) in the summer of 2003 and at Bank of America (New York, NY) in the summer of 2004 with preparing her for her current position. “They were instrumental in helping me build my technical skills,” says Lee. “I completed requirements analysis to develop, test and maintain a database at Bank of America, and at Empire State I configured, tested and provided backup for video and telephone conferences and helped with hardware and software installations. I learned what computer systems can and cannot do.”

Lee’s mentors during her internships provided her with guidance on how to make the most
of each opportunity. Her current mentor is a technical program manager at JPMorgan Chase. The two were matched through the company’s online self-guided mentor program, which enables employees to search the company’s mentor database for someone with a similar
job and/or goals.

“I chose my mentor based on her past experience as a project manager and business analyst,” Lee explains.

Lee’s job responsibilities as a business analyst in financial information delivery are to analyze internal clients’ business needs and then document and design solutions for their financial reporting applications. She translates their needs into functional specifications.

One assignment had her performing an independent analysis of business needs and then designing and developing a data repository and user interface to streamline the technology project reporting process.

During college she was active in the RIT chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, where she was president from 2004 to 2005, and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, where she was secretary for a year. “That taught me leadership and time management,” she says.

Freddie Mac’s Markiece L. Breeding does business analysis

Markiece L. Breeding graduated from Chicago State University (Chicago, IL)
in May 2007 with a BS in management information systems. He says his high school math teacher sparked his interest in computer programming.

Today, Breeding is a business analyst at Freddie Mac (McLean, VA). He’s responsible for translating customer business needs into requirements and functional specifications. He also remodels outdated use cases for modules of current Freddie Mac systems.

“Leadership training has been very helpful to me in my career, as we have many different people within the organization who have many different ways of looking at things,” he explains.

Breeding got leadership experience during two years as president of the Alpha Beta chapter of Iota Phi Theta fraternity. He’s also been vice president of the Organization of Minority Business Students, a program chairman for NSBE and a Thurgood Marshall College Fund Scholar.

He worked for Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” during college and got a lot of hands-on IT experience. He managed a team of sixteen people responsible for diagnosing and repairing PCs, and developed networks for small businesses and individual clients. Breeding acknowledges that mentors have made a difference in his career development. When he started at Freddie Mac, Timothy Woods, then a VP, and Ellis Carr, a director in finance, became his mentors. He hopes to return the favor by mentoring others as his career progresses.

At Freddie Mac, Breeding is involved in the company’s Rising Leaders program for junior employees, which helps them learn more about team work. He is also a member of Arise,
an employee network for African Americans at the company that encourages personal and professional growth, and a member of BDPA. And he participates in Freddie Mac University, which offers both leadership development and diversity training programs.

He plans to work at Freddie Mac for a long time. “I’d like to take my skills to the next level and then grow in my job from there.”

Jackie Zhou oversees QA at Philadelphia Gas Works

Jackie Zhou applies her masters in economics as well as her masters in engineering to her job as quality assurance (QA) manager for the information services department at Philadelphia Gas Works (Philadelphia, PA). “It is very important in my job to be able to apply analytics and logic, and my economics background helps me,” she says.

She got her MA in economics from the State University of New York-Binghamton in 2001, and her masters in engineering with a focus on computers and IT from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Philadelphia, PA) in 2002. Zhou also earned a BA in international economics at
Nankai University (Tianjin, China) in 1999.

Zhou began her career in 2003 at ExcelaCom Inc (Reston, VA), where she spent four years, first as a QA engineer and then as a QA project manager. As a QA engineer she worked with test cases and test plans, business and system requirements, and defect reporting and tracking processes. As a QA project manager she led a team of sixteen people, generated status metrics, coordinated testing with an offshore team, and created marketing/sales presentation materials for a new business line.

Because ExcelaCom was a start-up company, Zhou was exposed to a variety of areas in IT. That prepared her for her current QA role at Philadelphia Gas Works.

She started at Philadelphia Gas Works in 2007. She manages QA for a variety of projects and assigns teams as needed. Her current project has been in the works for a year and a half and involves automated applications for the company’s distribution operations. The current system is paper-based, and this will revolutionize the process, she explains.

“Communication between the technicians on site and in the office will be wireless and instant. We’ll have a laptop computer installed in every truck, and timesheets will be computerized and more accurate. When this is deployed it will eliminate redundant paperwork,” says Zhou. “This kind of computerization will be happening more and more throughout this industry.”

Her mentors have been her managers and colleagues. Currently she herself mentors a female co-worker and is training her in QA.

“Most of my co-workers are older and male and have worked here for many years. When I first came here I felt like I was too young,” she says. “But I’ve learned how to joke with them and they’ve become very helpful. I don’t think being female here is an obstacle, but you have to adapt yourself to the company culture and environment.”

Tina Sani: portfolio reporting systems for Credit Suisse

Tina Sani is an assistant vice president in equities IT at Credit Suisse (New York, NY). She’s responsible for developing and maintaining the U.S. component of the company’s global program trading portfolio reporting systems. These time-sensitive systems must be highly responsive to the needs of traders. There’s no margin for error, Sani notes.

“Seventy-five percent of my time is spent developing new tools or enhancing current systems. I also provide second level software support for about fifty traders in New York, San Francisco and Canada,” she says. “In an investment bank like ours, there is constant change and the pace is faster than in other industries. Most of our work is done in a rapid application development environment.”

Another aspect of her job is overseeing two QA professionals based in India. Her department makes code changes during the day that are tested overnight by the overseas QA team. The time zone difference means a quicker turnaround for the team’s release schedule.

Sani is a graduate of Credit Suisse’s Technical Associate (TA) program, a two-year IT program for selected new grads with bachelors or masters degrees. The program offers training in communication, team building, financial markets and technology, and additional training in specific skill areas.

The program gave Sani an instant support network. She’s still involved in follow-up training and keeps in touch with her fellow TAs at a variety of recruiting events.

Sani graduated from Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering (New York, NY) with a BSEE in 2003 and an MSEE in 2004. She is currently working on an MBA with a specialization in finance, strategy and entrepreneurship, which she hopes to complete in 2009. Credit Suisse is helping with tuition reimbursement.

“College for me was all about challenges. I was always looking toward my next project,” says Sani. “I knew I wanted to use my EE skills in an industry that wasn’t focused just on engineering. Working at Credit Suisse is definitely something different. It’s dynamic and rewarding in a whole new way.”

During college Sani did two IT internships at Consolidated Edison (New York, NY), working as an application and database programmer’s assistant, and then as an application server developer. She used Oracle 9i to design a three-tiered server model for deployment of forms and reports to the intranet. She was the first one there to use the new software.

“My internships helped me develop my analytical and communication skills,” she says. “My current position requires constant communication with traders and others across equities IT.

“As a software engineer in the financial industry you pick up many skills which can be leveraged for any career path. For example, analyzing client needs and product requirements to create new systems or tools is a skill that would be useful in a business analyst role. And using quantitative methods to design complex systems strengthens your analytical abilities, which are important for financial modeling and research,” she explains.

“Credit Suisse has a terrific internal mobility program that allows employees to move into different career paths if their skill sets are a good fit. It’s a great environment to be in and the opportunities for career growth are endless.

“I’d like to move to the front-office side of Credit Suisse one day, either in equities sales and trading or research, where I’d work in a position that was even more market-driven.”

Sani praises the company’s global diversity and inclusion program. She values her memberships in the company’s women’s and multicultural networks, which help her to meet co-workers and learn different workplace perspectives in a caring, supportive atmosphere.

D/C

Laura Gater is a freelance business and medical/ healthcare writer based in northeast Indiana.

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