OUR VWDS EXPO: An afternoon of learning, connecting and discovering new roads
VWDS is continuously growing, with new people joining, teams forming, and new opportunities arising. To ensure everyone stays equally informed about all the exciting news on projects and teams within our company, we hosted our first VWDS Expo – an event designed to foster internal mobility and collaboration among colleagues, across all Tech Units.
Our goal was to create an event that would present all the opportunities and our internal technical knowledge, but most importantly, that would allow our people to get to know each other better and have a great time while learning. A place where we could create new connections, discover new point of views and hopefully build new friendships.
On the 26th of September 2024, the first VWDS Expo was finally hosted at our newest CODE office, in Lisbon, Portugal. The presenting teams had their own table and necessary set-up, monitors, for eg., to present their projects. Attendees would have the opportunity to walk around and approach teams and projects of their interest. Just like a real fair! Despite being an in-person event, we had the wonderful opportunity to host a live stream, where our colleagues André Guerra, Diogo Silva, Rita Otero and Stephen Rigg would interview the presenting teams, so that the people at home could also learn a bit more about the projects.
The event ended with a small get-together – a great chance to connect and discuss the insights and wonders inspired by the Expo.
By creating this internal fair focused on internal mobility, we aimed to provide our people with another tool that allows themselves to continue driving their careers at VWDS. This event showcased the different challenges we face and maybe even helped them find their next exciting opportunity. If the fair didn’t encourage them to join new teams or take on a different role, it probably helped creating fresh ideas, and most importantly, rediscover their motivation, excitement, and enjoyment of working at VWDS.
We can proudly say that our Expo was a success! The feedback was positive and everyone’s looking for the next Edition.
In the end, we had 185 sign-ups, 48 people from all three Tech Units presenting their work and over 50 people attending online.
Even though these numbers sound awesome, they aren’t just numbers. They represent people who proudly talked about their projects and people who smiled while learning and those who continued talking about the event even today.
To conclude, this Expo wasn’t about numbers, or just to increase our internal mobilities (even though it would definitely be a nice side effect!). It was and will always be about our people, our VWDS family, our Tech Units, amazing teams and projects.