Professors and alumni of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg University (GSOM) have created for the VK Cup VKontakte project a course of eight lectures on the basics of doing business in IT companies. The project manager was Margarita Gladkova, Academic Director of the Business Analytics and Big Data Master's program.

 

 

“VK Cup” is an annual championship organized by VKontakte, in which participants compete in developing solutions to advanced technical tasks. Initially, the championship offered tasks in Olympiad programming, but in 2020 the profile of the participant was expanded to four areas: engineers, designers, mobile developers and machine learning specialists. The organizers also decided to offer participants a lecture course that teaches teamwork, approaches to product development, preparation of presentations, etc. Specialists from GSOM SPbU were invited to prepare a course on the basics of doing business.

 

“It is important for us, as the GSOM Family community that we represent, that technical specialists better understand the business, because it will make the business more efficient, and communication between technical employees and managers easier,” Margarita Gladkova commented on cooperation with VKontakte.

 

Margarita Gladkova, together with Tatyana Bobrus, School alumni and a lecturer and author of the “Design Thinking” course at GSOM, made a module on design thinking. Maria Smirnova, Head of the Marketing Department, gave lectures on product management, Maxim Arzumanyan, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Technology in Management, teaches how a flexible project management methodology works. Maria Dorokhina, Head of the GSOM Coaching Center, and Rostislav Speransky, Head of the Digital Laboratory <5G_Dream_Lab> at GSOM, talked about time management.

 

To record the lectures, it was possible to attract GSOM alumni — specialists in different fields — Ekaterina Mitusova, Team Lead of Customer success, Wrike, and Maria Misyuk, Product Manager, Wrike, who talked about project management, and specialists from the School's partner companies — VKontakte, DoDo Pizza, BeSmart and others.

 

Course lectures are available to a wide audience in the VK public group. The organizers see the goal of the VK Cup championship in creating a community of specialists of different levels and areas of software development, which will allow developing professional skills in a competitive environment and getting acquainted with the specifics of other areas. 

 

GSOM Family representatives took part in another VKontakte project "VK Fellowship", and recorded courses for teachers from the distant regions who created and used their own programming courses. Lectures of the course will be announced in April 2020 on the project page.