Partner in the spotlight: Ordina
It's already the last month of the year. For this month, we had a chat with Jens Helderweirdt of Ordina.
Can you introduce yourself and what's your role at Ordina?
I’m Jens Helderweirdt, father of a sweet little daughter Nimke and partner of a lovely girlfriend Lokke.
I started my career at Ordina about 8 years ago as a ‘Full stack .NET software engineer’ at the NCore unit of Ordina, a mouthful to say. My focus was laying on developing application with Microsoft technology. After a couple of projects within Ordina as well as for different clients, I had the chance to take up the role as a technical team lead in an High Performance Team at the Federal Police.
At that time I was already involved in a lot of community events within Ordina and more precise our NCore unit. The unit was growing quickly and they were looking for someone to take on the role of Practice Lead for our Young Professionals. I was eager to be able to coach and mentor the younger part of our squad, so of course I said yes.
At this moment I’m spending 4/5th of my time at clients in a team lead role. Besides that I’m working as a Practice Lead for the starters within the NCore unit. It’s not always easy to combine these, especially in terms of time management, but I get a lot of energy from the interesting conversations I’m having.
Can you tell us a bit more about Ordina?
In the nearly 50 years that Ordina has been in existence, I have had the opportunity to work for 8 of them and have seen our company continuously grow. When friends or family ask me to tell them about Ordina, I always say that for me it is an environment where you get opportunities if you are willing to take them.
Ordina is an ideal environment to grow as a consultant and they also offer the tools to do so. The slogan is "Ahead of change" and besides supporting our clients in this, this is also part of our DNA, our people and our mindset. To stand still is to fall behind and by keeping a close eye on the ball, both technologically and in terms of people, each person starts to evolve from the moment they take their first step at Ordina.
Of course, starting an evolution does not happen on your own, Ordina puts a lot of effort into teamwork. I myself am part of this and I notice that it makes a world of difference if you can surround yourself with a group of people with a variety of skills and knowledge.
Being surrounded by your Ordina colleagues, "Ordinezen" as we call them, makes you ask for help or a second opinion more quickly and sharing knowledge becomes a natural thing. By being given the opportunity to work so closely together, you learn to trust each other, dare to push people out of their comfort zone and give them space to grow.
By achieving successes together as a team, this also translates into success stories with our customers, enabling us to deliver end-to-end projects as expected.
Ordina sponsors Visug and the community for years. Why do you sponsor?
The days when technology was learned behind a computer screen in a dark room, as so many clichés tell us, are gone... Deepen knowledge in existing technologies and frameworks, discovering brand new things,... A lot of those things only come together once you have a community or group of like-minded people who want to share knowledge.
This is also one of the reasons why we have been a sponsor and partner of Visug for years, as well as other user groups such as Azug and conferences like Techorama and NG-BE.
We as Ordina and NCore strongly believe in the concept of knowledge sharing. This can be found internally, in the form of community evenings, competence centres, internal conferences...But if the opportunity arises, we also want to support other communities such as Visug. Of course, financial support is an important element, but we also regularly try to make our office space available for a Visug event in combination with a delicious pizza. As a cherry on top of the cake, some of our colleagues like to give a session at a Visug event once in a while.
So, our contribution to Visug is twofold: on the one hand, we want to support the software development community and, on the other, it obviously contributes to Ordina's visibility.
What is for you an ideal Visug event?
An ideal Visug event is one that encompasses several aspects. First of all, everything starts with interesting sessions: a healthy mix between deep-dive sessions and introduction level sessions so that it is accessible to a wide audience. In addition, the connection between the attendees is at least as important. Nice, informal chats where there is no barrier to learn from each other. As a sponsor, it is of course always nice if people get to know you through these kinds of events or, conversely, if you as a company get to know new people.
Thank you for your time, Jens!