ICEF Students Hold Career Forum at HSE

On March 13, the career forum organized by Keystone financial club, an ICEF student organization, was held at the Atrium of the HSE Pokrovka complex. The club leaders, students Alexey Mastalygin and Suren Zarinyan, spoke about employment trends, future skills, and the event as a whole.

Meeting with your dream company

Companies such as EY, Ozon, UBS, PwC, Gett, Sberbank, Deloitte, and others offered internships and jobs for young specialists. Due to the quarantine, not all companies were able to attend the event in person. For example, Coca-Cola held a remote presentation using a media screen.

‘Our main goal is to create space for direct communication between students and employers. I know how difficult it is to choose your professional path,’ says Alexey. ‘Moreover, students generally don’t know about the opportunities that are out there. For example, few programmers think about working in the Central Universal Department Store, but this company has a versatile analytics department, which needs people who know programming languages and are engaged in machine learning and data modeling.’

According to Keystone, this year the demand for banking and consulting has decreased a little, while work in data science, digital transformation, and agile is becoming increasingly popular. Companies particularly look for people who can automate processes and manage them competently.

Forum participants could send their resumes to HR managers of leading companies in advance, then undergo mock interviews and get feedback at the event. According to the organizers, they received over 80 CVs, which showed that almost all students, who have completed their third year of studies, already have work experience.

‘What we especially liked is that almost all CVs were in English. This is very important, since some companies do not accept CVs in Russian,’ says Alexey.

_{Future skills and what you shouldn’t be afraid of}

The Keystone team noted that one of the main trends in the HR market is a certain devaluation of education. Employers often just don't pay attention to this section of the CV if the candidate already has work experience. Continuing education comes to the fore: it shows that a person is ready to continually develop.

‘I often notice that first-year students are afraid to submit their CVs to companies and look for summer internships, because they are not confident of their skills. This is fundamentally wrong,’ says Alexey. ‘An internship involves learning and engaging in tasks from simple to complex. There are many companies that accept first-year students, like Danone, for example.’

According to Alexey, you can see problem solving skills in the requirements of almost every job. In general, it is the ability to divide a problem into parts and distribute the work among the team members. Programming helps you to acquire these skills, so courses and electives in Python or Java will be very useful.

Immersing yourself in your profession

In addition to HR sessions and brand presentations, students took part in a creative financial game from KPMG. This is something like an Alias Party board game, but intended for the development of financial literacy featuring terms from audit.

The forum also featured a round table with Albert Sagiryan, former head of Gemcorp Capital in Russia, an international hedge fund worth $1.2 billion. Albert and his partners are currently working on establishing their own fund. ‘It is interesting that just a week before his speech at HSE, he gave a lecture at LSE, and he liked HSE a lot and sincerely shared this on his Instagram,’ says Suren.

Keystone club

The club has been holding the Career Forum at HSE University for six years now. Initially, the Keystone team focused on Investment Banking, which was super popular with ICEF students. But over time, thanks to the alumni community, the list of contacts with employers started to grow, and today it covers almost all areas: from finance to pharmaceuticals.

‘Now we are 3^rd-year students and we are already looking for successors, choosing the most active junior members of the club, and next year we will prepare them to take the leadership of Keystone,’ says Suren.

In addition, our organization actively cooperates with HSE alumni. For example, for this event they invited the coffee shop Projector, owned by an ICEF graduate. The coffee shop representatives treated all guests to delicious eclairs.

The club's next big event, the Career Choice panel discussion, is scheduled for the autumn. It will bring together representatives of different industries and, in a battle format, they will tell you why you should work in their field. This is a great opportunity to learn about the advantages, pitfalls, and traits of a particular industry.

 In the meantime, you can follow the latest career events, vacancies, and internships on the Keystone Vkontakte page.

March 16, 2020