Not all people are familiar with integrations and that they could provide an interesting career opportunity. It was the same for me. I ended up working with integrations by chance. But once I did, I liked it very much. I was familiar with many of the concepts because I had been doing some software development before. There were also interesting new things like integration platforms and low-code. I enjoy working in between business and technical people. Integrations give a good view of the business environment of a company. All the separate systems inside and outside of the company need to be able to communicate with each other and often some additional logic needs to be added. And as with many of the things we do here at Solita, it has been a good combination of problem-solving, learning and teamwork.
Therefore, I’ll also tell you about integrations and what it is like to work with them. Later, in my next blog post, I will write about the related technical skills. I hope you find these things interesting whether you are an experienced developer or at the beginning of your tech career.
These general skills help you on your integration path
I think that some general skills will take you far in any job and make you a desired employee.
I’ll mention motivation first and being interested in the stuff you work with. If you are motivated, you will probably take responsibility for your work. By responsibility, I mean that you don’t give up if you face problems or don’t know how to go forward. You don’t have to know the correct answers but if you are motivated, you’ll learn the skills needed.
It’s important to be able to learn new things and solve problems independently but it is equally important to be able to ask others for help. Asking others doesn’t tell much about your skills. Instead, it shows that you are motivated, and you’re actively solving problems. So, it’s important to be able to work with others.
You should also keep in mind that every person is an individual with different kinds of strengths. You are probably not aware of all your strengths, as those things are easy for you. To understand your strengths, you can ask your colleagues or supervisor their point of view. If not right away, then eventually, you’ll find the kind of customer work that suits your skills best. At Solita, staffing takes into account your wishes and skill set when finding your next customer work.
What are integrations and integration platforms and why are they needed?
There are a huge number of applications for many different purposes in companies. Many of these apps need to communicate with each other but they don’t necessarily speak the same language or have any means to communicate.
Integrations are the missing piece between these apps. They may transform the message that is being transferred. Or they may balance the number of messages being sent so that the receiver can cope with the traffic. The integration may be a couple of lines of code, or it may be a bigger application. It depends on the need and the availability of resources, like current software, budget, and people’s skills.
Integration platforms, such as MuleSoft Anypoint, help with many crosscutting concerns like logging, monitoring, and authentication. They typically provide ready-made user interfaces for viewing logs and controlling security-related issues among many other things. The developer implementing the integration can concentrate more on higher-level things while the integration platform takes care of the details. Sometimes you need to write code, for example, to transform the format of the data being transferred. Sometimes just configuration is enough.
General fears
As mentioned in the beginning, I asked people about their recruitment-related fears. I hope going through these things will help and encourage you to apply.
One common concern was language skills. Our working language is English as we have nearly 50 nationalities at Solita and therefore a lot of the information is in English.
In Finland, some projects are in Finnish and some in English. Finnish is not always needed, but we have some customer projects where Finnish skills are required. The demand varies over time and thus the recruitment needs vary also. Solita has offices and activities in several countries, so if you happen to speak, for example, Swedish, Estonian or German, they could be useful in some projects.
Some people were worried about their age. Solita hires people of all ages and age isn’t an important factor. The recruitment process considers if you fit the caring, relaxed, understanding and diverse culture; non-technical and technical skills.
Hopefully this blog post gave you a better understanding of the purpose of integration work and general skills that help you in your integration career. In my next blog post, I’ll tell you more about integration-related technical skills.
Interested in working at Solita? See our open integration positions.