Nets greeted me with open arms

Gagandeep Kaur (24) got a somewhat unusual start as a part-time programmer at Nets. She initiated the job at Nets herself after leading a coding course for children of the company's employees. Combining the work with her master's studies, she now works one day a week as a programmer at Nets. Gagandeep encourages students to reach out to employers to gain experience during their studies. The part-time job has given her advantages that other graduates can only dream of.

"Studies don't teach you how to work on real projects, but I have learned a lot about this through my part-time work. In addition, I get to know the working environment and the dynamics of the organization," Gagandeep says.

Destined to be a plumber
Gagandeep has always made different choices than her friends, and during upper secondary school, the work as a craftsperson seemed tempting. But just to be safe, she wanted first to take natural science and mathematics in upper secondary school.

"I wanted to work on something tangible, something that I would be able to create and develop. Therefore, I strongly considered becoming a plumber. But once you have set out a course in upper secondary school, it is difficult to change and start something completely new. My first other option was pharmacy, but I discovered that chemistry actually is incredibly boring, so instead, I chose computer science at the University of Oslo.

A choice she has not regretted
Gagandeep is going to complete her master's degree program in the prescribed time while working one day a week. She is working in the Digitalisation department, on backend development in Java. Right now, Gagandeep and her colleagues are re-writing some of the existing system for Spring boot, a more recent Java framework.

- It's incredibly exciting to put theory into practice. At school, there is room for mistakes, but here everything has to be 100 % correct. Fortunately, we have excellent routines to ensure quality, she adds.

Switched robots with Java
Gagandeep is not the only one entering Nets in a somewhat untraditional way. Amund Froknestad (28) finished his master's degree in cybernetics at NTNU when he discovered that he liked coding even better than robots. He knew several (code) languages, but realized that he lacked expertise in Java.

"My recruitment agency, Experis, suggested that I should attend an intensive course in Java. Being able to use other programming languages, it was relatively easy for me to learn Java," says Amund.

After completing a three-month course, Amund was hired as a consultant at Nets. After six months as a hired consultant on a contract with Experis, Amund is ready to start as a permanent employee at Nets after the summer holidays. According to Amund, it has been worth the world to be able to work with experienced developers at Nets.

"Everyone understood that I needed training to understand the code base, and I spent a lot of time with experienced developers discussing various challenges that we solved together. In this way, I gained an understanding of how the systems are designed and have been able to work more independently over time," Amund explains.

Amund works as a developer in Clearing Services, contributing to ensure Nets' RealTime Clearing system continues to provide stable transactions to the international market. Currently, this entails a boost of the code base in Nexi (formerly ICBPI).

"Amund and Gagandeep are excellent examples of how we often have to take an untraditional approach to recruiting. The industry is rapidly changing, and it is incredibly important to us to be able to recruit and train new people and empower them to fill their roles," says Kari Engensbakken Bjørklund, head of IT development at Nets.