“I want to improve the digital workday for many people”
There are many paths into the IT industry, and for Frida Andreasen it was not in the cards that with a degree in Library and Information Science she would have a career in IT. But the internet's blooming in the late 1990s changed that, and today Frida works as a Managing Consultant at Delegate in the Modern Workplace team.
"In connection with my degree, I first became familiar with websites and then with the intranet, and I completely fell in love with the intranet and how it could be used in companies."
Although a degree in Library and Information Science does not immediately sound like the obvious path into the IT world, Frida Andreasen makes daily use of her education in her role as a Managing Consultant at Delegate:
"My expertise is based on theories of how we take large amounts of information and put them into a system so that we can find them again. So, I know a lot about how to build a good information structure, how search works, how to build a taxonomy, etc. And I am extremely structured in my approach to my work. That is a huge advantage, both as a project manager and when you as a solution responsible need an overview of the solution."
Frida Andreasen
Managing Consultant, Delegate
As newly graduated, Frida gets a job at Bispebjerg Hospital, which is the starting point of her career in IT. At Bispebjerg, she is given the task of managing the hospital's first intranet and maintaining the hospital's website:
"I'm completely newly graduated, so they take a chance on me. To be considered for the job, you had to know HTML - which I didn't know at all - but I still said that I did. So, I got the job, and had to buy books and learn HTML in a hurry," Frida laughs, who has more or less been working with intranet ever since."
She has spent seven years in the engineering company Haldor Topsøe, where Frida, as intranet manager, was responsible for building and rolling out a global intranet to offices in ten countries. A close collaboration with colleagues in the IT department meant that Frida learned more and more about SharePoint and IT architecture and gradually became more interested in the IT solutions than she could in her position in the communications department.
A New Role as Consultant
Along the way, she had two children, and at one point she begins to consider the possibility of becoming a consultant - something she had avoided for many years:
"I had an idea that it required a lot of flexibility on my part in terms of meeting times. I did not think it would fit with picking up and dropping off my children. But here Delegate's "Work from Anywhere" concept is a gift. I think it's so fantastic that I can just decide that I work from home today, because it suits me best - without having to first agree with my boss."
A job posting as a digital project manager at Delegate convinced her that the time was right to try the consultant role. The first year she primarily worked as a Project Manager, while today her function is to be a Consultant within the Modern Workplace:
"I really like being a Project Manager, but in that role, you rarely have influence on the solution itself. That is something I am passionate about. I want to improve the digital workday for many people. It's about being part of identifying what the customer's needs are and being part of putting together solutions that make it easier and maybe more fun to be employed."
As a Managing Consultant at Delegate, Frida has a broad job description:
"I am involved in both the initial conversations with potential and new customers and subsequently in the delivery. My task is mostly to talk to customers and get a sense of who they are and how we can help them. I hold a lot of workshops. If it's SharePoint projects, I help set up and configure the solution, while my developer colleagues take care of integrations and other development. In other projects, I have the Project Manager role. I closely follow the new features and products from Microsoft, so I can advise our customers as best as possible."
What would you say to a woman considering entering the IT industry?
"That it is the coolest industry ever, because this is where it's happening! We haven't seen anything yet when it comes to digitization, so many exciting things will happen in the future that I am looking forward to being a part of. Remember that there are many paths into IT, and we don't just need programmers. We need to create good solutions for the people who will use them, so we need different skills."
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