3 Questions to Dania Radi*, Project Leader of OPENSKIMR
“What does OPENSKIMR mean to you?”
OPENSKIMR means to me inspiration and a high motivation to develop an amazing tool which aims to support people in their career planning in order to combat youth unemployment and foster Europe’s mobility. OPENSKIMR is a combination of life-long learning and top job opportunities which shows talents diverse directions.
To be honest, when I finished high school or my bachelor degree I would have loved to have had a tool like OPENSKIMR at hand. A tool which shows me opportunities based on my skill set. At that age, I and many of my fellow colleagues were scared about the question of what to do in the future – because you just don’t know if you have the right skills to reach your personal goals or if you will miss other opportunities.
I see this project as my personal adventure. Working with an amazing and motivated team makes it even better. OPENSKIMR fascinates me and I want to put my heart and soul into the project making it a success.
“What was your biggest challenge as project leader in the OPENSKIMR project”
I think the biggest challenge is to ensure a common understanding of the project scope. Everyone had different visions and ideas, which of course enlarges the idea-set. However, it was necessary that the whole team stands on a common ground. We had a lot of discussions at the beginning and I learned that sometimes you need to ask each team member twice to make sure everybody understood it correctly.
I believe this is quite normal – it is the phase of team formation and finding the right internal communication patterns. I am convinced that it supported us to become the strong team we are today.
Another challenge is to ensure that all team members are up-to-date. Constantly keeping an eye on the social communicating tools we use internally and informing everybody from the team at the right time is not always an easy task. However, I am proud that we now have this running smoothly.
“What was the nicest moment?”
The nicest moment… that’s a really difficult question. I have lot of pictures in my mind. I think one of the nicest moments was during a workshop in Madrid. The core team had met and discussed how the matching could work and how to integrate ESCO … and suddenly there was this moment when everyone had the same understanding, every member was completely on track… we didn’t even need to talk anymore. It was a feeling which made me totally proud. The team became a real team!
*With experiences in several IT and Management focused projects Dania is responsible for project management as well as for requirement engineering tasks concerning OPENSKIMR.