If you haven’t heard, Da Nang is an up-and-coming tech development hotspot, with an emphasis on “up” these days. A combination of a large and growing young, hip, well-educated population, an excellent natural environment, and a government friendly to and focused on tech development makes the city an excellent place for a tech company like SmartDev.
Because our offshore development center (ODC) calls this town home, we consider it our responsibility to do our part for the community by providing internships for talented youngsters itching to break into the tech field. It’s something that’s worked out well for all involved. Here, we’ll tell you just how it benefits the community and its young people, us, and our clients. We’re looking at a win-win-win scenario here. It’s both wholesome and useful.
SmartDev’s Internship Program
Let’s start with a simple assertion: Education is positively exploding in Vietnam, producing world-class talent in many sectors. Many talented young people gravitate towards software development, which is where we come in.
Having fun with your team makes work more lively
We offer internships to students at local universities with the aim of helping students hone their software skills. These internships are far more than just a formality: Students learn real working skills on the job and work closely with mentors and even our HR department to get the “Real Job Feel.” Those who have been through internships will likely remember the experience of their first job or internship and how far they’ve come since then.
Hopefully, if that’s you, you’ll remember your experience fondly. We sincerely aim for that to be the case for our interns, too.
The numbers tend to back up our optimism. Often, up to 60% of our interns end up joining the company as employees after their internship. Launching our internship program, we have a four-stage recruitment process that goes like this:
- Step 1: Interns undergo an online test.
- Step 2: Interns then undergo a technical interview.
- Step 3: Those steps are followed up by an HR Interview.
- Step 4: If the student passes steps 1-3, they’ll receive an intern agreement followed by on-boarding.
Because our interns work directly with the company, we’ve noticed there’s fewer cases of the jitters during interviews — familiarity breeds confidence.
While our interns don’t work on current client projects (we wouldn’t dream of that), they do work on demo projects and go through a series of training programs designed to bolster both their skills and their chutzpah. Interns work closely with their mentors — employees at the company — reporting to them on a daily basis. Our mentors take their roles seriously while thoroughly enjoying passing on their knowledge.
In addition, the HR department holds weekly meetings with the interns to help them on any HR issues and get the students more used to working in a company. It does take a significant mental shift to switch from university work to work-work, and we’re sympathetic to that required shift in mindset.
SmartDev’s Client Project Process
So, you’ve learned a bit about our internship programs, and hopefully understand us a bit more. But if you’re a potential client, you’d likely like to know just how working with us goes.
Food and drink are constant companions to camaraderie.
We’re certainly flexible enough to work with clients in a way they’d prefer, but we also have an established process that’s worked well for both us and clients in the past.
Specifically, our developers will work directly with the client under the client’s management. The developers become a temporary extension of another organization with all the support a well-established software company like ourselves can deliver.
We assign a project manager to each project to be the sole point of contact between the client and our developers. We find that this particular effort streamlines communications by eliminating redundancy and any potential confusion. At the same time, the top end of our organization is well aware of both the progress of the project and our client’s satisfaction. The latter of those is our only goal and entire business model: A fully satisfied client is the only outcome we’ll allow ourselves to achieve.
A Bit of SmartDev Fun
Like you, we’re humans, too. Unless you’re a bot or advanced AI reading this, in which case disregard that message and please be kind to us should you take over the world.
Don’t worry, they actually got food after this.
People need to have fun to be fulfilled, so we do our part to ensure our employees are happy and have some social outlet with their colleagues. For us, that means Happy Friday — a time for our hard-working staff to kick back, relax, and let their hair down a bit.
This means having some yummy snacks, a drink and a chat, and some fun games should people feel like playing. Rather than a stilted team building exercise, this time is one our employees really look forward to — to the point where they’ll remind our HR department about a party before the party happens. Our HR department reminded us to say this, too, which means they look forward to it as well. Really, everyone’s in on the fun.
Getting It Done Right
We take our commitment to our clients and our community quite seriously. At the same time, we’re not so serious-minded that we forget the human side of people — we’re keen to have fun and kick back now and then. Life is about balance just like it’s about giving, and we’re proud to be a company with a conscience.
SmartDev’s management team, including Maxime (left) and Vincent (right) enjoy a good time as well.
Want to see how working with us can benefit you? Want to know more about us? Want to see who’s in charge and get a bit more detail on just how we operate? Reach out to us for a free quote or write to us at (insert email) and we’ll get back to you ASAP. We’d love to hear from you.
