About Juuli Kylmänen, Digital Workforce Team Lead for public sector accounts

Juuli joined Digital Workforce in May 2017 as a Solutions Consultant through an internal referral. She had previously worked in several roles within the IT sector. Before joining DWF she was working with agile software development, business and integration analysis.

At the time Digital Workforce was a fast-growing young start-up, so Juuli had to jump straight into work and already had her first customer meeting on her 2nd day! She began working in the financial sector and received training in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to familiarise with the technological aspects of her new job.

After her first summer at Digital Workforce Juuli started to work in technical projects such as defining work process for automation and setting up RPA pilots and Robot-as-a-Service environments. She also began working as a team with a newly recruited developer, and together the pair started managing their own customer projects. Due to her more extended experience and previous background, Juuli took on the role of Lead Developer.

At the beginning of 2018, Digital Workforce won 2 big public sector tenders. These were assigned to Juuli, and she became a Project Manager. More specialists were assigned to her projects as well, and Juuli became the Team Lead for the team running Digital Workforce’s public sector projects in Finland.

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Juuli’s thoughts about her work at Digital Workforce:

Why do you think you were assigned to the public sector clients and became a Team Lead?

“Being punctual, helping others and coming up with good development is important in my work. I have always tried to show initiative and be proactive, which I think has played a part in why I was assigned as a Project Manager in the first place. I also took the initiative to schedule meetings with my manager to talk about my future development.”

What do you expect of your future career development?

“I have always seen myself as a generalist. I never specifically pushed myself towards the development (technology) side even though my skills in this area have also grown over the years. My strengths lie in project management, and I think that the public sector market offers huge growth potential for service provides like Digital Workforce. I’m also interested in the international aspect of our business. I’m quite bad, however, at planning my future ahead of time and will see how things develop as we go.”

What have been your most significant learning curves?

“I realized that the more you learn, the more you understand how much there is still to learn. It's a rollercoaster sometimes, and you have to accept never being ready.”

What have been your biggest challenges?

“My biggest challenges have been time allocation and to choose where to put my focus. I’ve had to balance my time between project management and development. Also, it has sometimes been difficult to find time for self-development around these topics. If I could go back in time, I would probably move a bit slower and take more time to reflect on my work continuously.”

What would you say to others searching for self-development opportunities?

“I would encourage everyone to jump on things they find interesting. If you see something interesting - jump on it, you can always jump off if you like! Especially in fast-moving environments, you have to act not to lose the opportunity. The best you can do is to openly talk with your team manager or show your interest in team meetings, but also take ownership of your development! It is important to gain the support of your manager and to have transparency, structure, and follow-ups on development opportunities.”