This article first appeared in the bimonthly ORAWORLD e-magazine, an EOUC publication with exciting stories from the Oracle world, technological background articles and insights into other user groups worldwide. |
I studied at Karlsruhe, a German city having roughly a population of 310,000 of which 43,000 are students [1]. Studying computer science there is pretty popular, and keeps getting even more popular. In 2016 there were 3,623 students enrolled in computer science at The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. That figure has more than doubled since 1998 where there were only 1492 students enrolled [2, 3]. This might also be the reason why it feels like there is an IT job fair almost twice a week. Young talents are desperately wanted.
I am one of these students and a millennial (the generation born roughly between 1980 and 2000). And besides the fact that it feels great to be sought-after, it can also become very difficult to find your personal right track. Therefore, I decided to become part of the “Next Generation” community at the German Oracle user group, DOAG. We simply call ourselves #NextGen. We are a group of young people that intend to make DOAG more attractive to other young people of the millennial generation and help each other during our first steps in business.
The Idea of #NextGen
User groups are getting older, and DOAG is no exception. That’s not only because we are celebrating our 30th anniversary as a user group. Our average members also keep getting older. This is what kept us thinking. Somehow DOAG did not manage to reach out to the young people, despite offering many benefits for students and apprentices like free entrance to our events, and a free membership for the user group.
The reasons for that might be way more complex. But in our opinion, there was one decisive disadvantage: DOAG did not meet the expectations of the young generation because they simply didn’t know them. In other words, it is quite difficult to grow a network of 25-year-old students, apprentices and young professionals if most of you are from a completely different generation. Luckily, at DOAG there are quite a few people that are way younger, but until recently there was no space for them to unfold. That is why, in 2016 the DOAG board decided to do something against the journey to retirement and created the #NextGen community. The idea is simple: if you cannot create a network for young people, make it possible for them to create their own.
#NextGen Goals
All of our #NextGen members are, more or less, new to the business. But what is even more important: we are of the same age as the people we are trying to address. Our goal is to build an exchange platform that enables young people to connect with each other and kick-start their personal network, talk about success and failure, get advice, find mentoring and discuss the latest trends in IT. All of these are basically key aspects of a user group, in general. So, are we creating a user group inside a user group? Somehow yes, but not really. The mindset our generation comes with is radically different from the one currently present at DOAG. And we are certain that adapting to this mindset is crucial to continued existence and growth of DOAG.
It’s nothing new that every new generation that enters the labor market comes unburdened, but heavily influenced by the environment it grew up in. As millennials, we are the first generation to grow up with the Internet that has revolutionized the way we share information. Compared with DOAG’s early days many things have changed and therefore, we are currently dealing with a large generation gap. Our plan is to bridge that gap so that both sides can profit from each other. Therefore, we are at first required to build a solid foundation of young, motivated people to work with, before integrating them with our existing user group.
Focus on the Network
The millennials are very much focused on specific technologies. Every day or two there is a new framework or tool supposed to revolutionize the way software is built. But at the end of the day we should be aware that it’s not tools that build great software but people. And that experience usually beats tools. Therefore, we do not focus on specific content or technologies but rather on the strength of the existing network at DOAG and beyond. Just like we did with POUG (Poland), when we visited their conference with a group of 20 young students and apprentices in September 2017.
We also rebuilt our “NextGen Program” that allows students and apprentices to visit all our DOAG events for free. Thus, they get many possibilities to meet like-minded people and potential employers. We also encourage companies to send their young employees to participate in the #NextGen community and, additionally, we are cooperating closely with universities and vocational schools by offering guest lectures and events at their place.
Besides that, we offer people to jump into action and evolve by participating in our “Newcomer Program” where we help unexperienced speakers to give their first talk at one of our conferences by receiving mentoring from an experienced speaker.
Establishing a new Brand
In our opinion, all of this would not have been possible by using our existing DOAG brand. We needed to create our own green field to make room for our new direction. That is why we decided to establish our own brand that is used with all our activities and in social media. A standalone brand that is nevertheless related to DOAG. That way we created an independent anchor all our activities can be tied to. Although we are currently at the very beginning, we are looking forward to continuously evolve in the future. Of course, there are yet many lessons to learn, and there will also be failure. But in the end, we want to become an open network and a social hub that offers guidance and helps young people to orientate in today’s fast-moving IT-world.
Links:
Sources:
- https://www.karlsruhe.de/b2/wissenschaft_bildung/studenten_wissen.de
- https://www.kit.edu/downloads/Statistik_WS2016.pdf
- https://www.kit.edu/downloads/Statistik_WS98.pdf
