Recently, I asked myself the question: how do young professionals differ from us? Are they different? Or have we just forgotten what we were like at the beginning of our career?

We have four students at Cloudmaker who combine study and work. One is in his third year at Satpayev University, and three are in their final year at KBTU. They are energized, ambitious, and striving for results. 

I suggested to one of the fourth-year students to write a thesis not "on paper", but on a real project. At that moment, we had just started working with Alexey Chistyakov on TopHR 360, a tool for automated assessment of 360 competencies. We needed to redesign the big TopHR so that it could work without integration with 1C.

At KBTU, theses are now team-based (when I studied, we worked alone). Our talented colleague brought two classmates, but their enthusiasm was moderate. I told them about the project, about Alexey's request, and about the needs of the market. In order not to drown in abstraction, we started with specific tasks. It was necessary to implement:

, Manual loading of the organizational structure

, Personal accounts of employees and managers

Dashboards with analytics

But instead of moving "in order", we decided to go from the result. We started with dashboards, which could really show the value of the product. We had historical data on the assessment of competencies, and Alexey helped identify key metrics.

Examples:

Average rating – the average assessment of employee competencies

Top 3/5 strong competencies - the best skills of a company or individual groups

📌 Top 3/5 growth zones - skills that need improvement

Distribution of estimates – minimum, maximum and median values

After a while, three students assembled the first dashboard with 13 indicators, and we decided to show it to the customer.

At the demo day, the guys presented the results themselves. They showed how everything works in TopHR, explained the logic, and demonstrated analytics. Alexey gave a positive feedback and suggested a couple of improvements.

And here something clicked.

Up to this point, the students were just "coding". Now they have seen a real customer, a real market need. They no longer needed to explain why this product was needed.

From that moment on, everything changed. They did the integration with WhatsApp Business API themselves. Competence assessment can now take place not only on the web, but also in a chatbot. All results are saved to TopHR, and dashboards are built automatically.

And the other day there was another breakthrough. They have prepared the employee upload interface via Excel. Now all you need to import is your full name, position, and supervisor's full name. Based on this data, an organizational structure is automatically built, and the system itself determines the evaluators for the 360 assessment. There are only a few details left to complete, and we will have a full—fledged tool for automated 360 assessment.

Young specialists are cooler than us.They learn quickly, easily master new technologies, and are able to work in multitasking mode. But the main thing is that when they believe in their work, they are ready to move mountains. They don't need constant monitoring. Give them a goal, and they'll find their way.

They need creative freedom. And when they get it, they create the future.