What happens when Deutsche Bank, Salesforce and 35 passionate international talents from universities across Germany come together? You create an innovative space to learn and develop new ideas and solutions. This is exactly what happened during a two-day HackTechathon.
The purpose of this event was to inspire students to embark on their digital career journeys, to give them the chance to explore different technologies, to collaborate in diverse teams, to learn about various internship and graduate roles opportunities at Deutsche Bank and to explore the Salesforce Talent Ecosystem.
The use-case? Different teams competed to solve the following challenge: Where and with what impact would it be the most efficient to build a parking garage to avoid parking tickets and other parking issues?
How? Python was used to analyse datasets containing parking violations and Tableau to visualise the results. But let’s start from the beginning!
The Techathon kicked off in no other location than the Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. The participants could nearly touch the sky as they were welcomed to the 38th floor by the Deutsche Bank Graduate Recruiting team, Salesforce representatives, and Python and Tableau experts. After the Deutsche Bank Senior Manager welcomed the talents, kickstarted the event and an ice-breaker session took place, the teams were set up.
Subsequently, during a discussion panel, employees of Deutsche Bank shared their work experiences on what it is/was like being a working student or graduate at Deutsche Bank.
After a healthy lunch mixed with connecting and networking, the students dived into the use case and directly started working on a solution by answering questions such as: How to best approach the challenge? How to analyse the data sets and interpret the output? Day 1 ended with exhausted yet energised faces and a great networking dinner to re-energize.
On Day 2, the energy in the room was supercharged and the talents had the opportunity to learn more about starting their career at Deutsche Bank. And, even more to learn about the Salesforce Talent Ecosystem by learning new skills with the Salesforce learning platform Trailhead. Afterwards, the teams had some time left to work on their findings and to prepare their final recommendation in an executive summary. Afterwards, they had lunch which was a well-deserved break. Then, it was showtime in the afternoon! All six teams presented their solutions in front of the jury composed of the Deutsche Bank and Tableau experts. For heightened learning, all students were present in the room. The main focus was on a) the team’s collaborative journeys, b) findings and c) recommendations.
Wondering who won? The teams were assessed on the basis of (1) technical implementation, (2) idea, (3) presentation and (4) collaboration. The winning team not only reached the maximum points in technical implementation but also managed to collaborate best through thorough communication, transparency on challenges, several discussions and diversity of leadership styles. They were additionally rewarded because they successfully evaluated different approaches and thought outside the box when solving the business challenge. Furthermore, the Tableau Expert mentioned that the team integrated Analytics greatly to support their argumentation and used the charts excellently to answer the asked questions. An outstanding team.
“We are glad to be a part of this impactful event. Helping young talents to see, understand and act on their data skills will bring all of us one step closer to becoming a globally connected modern data-driven community.”
– Ivan Petrović, AVP and Country Manager, Tableau Germany
“For me, personally, networking with experts from two different industries was super valuable. When else do you have Salesforce and Deutsche Bank together in one place?”
– Niklas Büchel, Computer Science at RWTH Aachen
“Agreed! We had intense two days with a lot of insight and exchanges with the experts, but it was definitely refreshing next to our everyday university life!”
– Ibrahima Iba Diallo, Computer Science and Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt
“Impressive to see how fast the teams, equipped with different skills and backgrounds, presented truly relevant results in such a short time period.”
– Sadiye Tsokis, Program Managerin, TDI Trainee Programs; Deutsche Bank
This event was a great success. A big thanks to all the participants, for their energy and innovative solutions. It was impressive to see what all of them achieved during this short amount of time. In addition, a big shout-out to organisers from Deutsche Bank and Salesforce for putting together an event like this. We are excited about the collaboration and cannot wait to see other initiatives to grow digital talent across EMEA. If you are a Salesforce customer or partner and would like to organise a similar event, please get in touch with us at: EMEAtalentecosystem@salesforce.com.
