Advertisement

Education Lifestyle

Joanna Kader, director of services delivery, iTMethods

We are cloud experts and Amazon Web Services certified partners. I ensure end-to-end delivery of our clients’ technical projects, which makes me the first contact with the client, and I’m responsible for collecting information and analyzing gaps in our processes. We call it customer obsession. I’m here to nurture our client relationships.

I’m from Syria and after high school I studied English literature at Damascus University. I specialized in translation and started working with the United Nations. Then I moved into the oil and gas sector. Because I’m good in math, I taught myself computer skills and worked as a project manager in oil and gas. 

When I immigrated to Canada in 2000, I recognized that I needed to support the skills I’d learned on my own with education. I took a French course at Ryerson University and I got addicted to taking courses. I finished the business management certificate in 2008. Last year I took the big data and predictive analysis program through Ryerson’s Chang School.

After I finished business management, I was interested in the MBA program. I took a few finance courses to prepare myself for that, but I became more interested in statistics and big data, which was all the hype.

Big data involves statistics and coding simultaneously. The course prepared us with the concepts of coding and how you can use computer languages to obtain results in statistics. We had lab classes from 8 am to 2 pm – one lab was on mining data from tweets, for example. We also learned how to apply statistical tools to analyze trends. This polished my analytical skills. 

I was a mature student, so coming back to school meant I was competing with the younger generation. I’d changed my career totally from business management to statistics and coding, but some of these kids had been coding since high school. Some of them speak programming languages better than English. So it took me longer to get the coding down.

A lot of people said I was crazy to jump into this field, but I say: don’t listen to them – just believe in yourself. I was learning a completely new language. With translation, I knew English and Arabic and I had time to go through my scripts and perfect them, but with coding I had to command a language I didn’t know anything about. The concept of coding and telling the computer what to do was really daunting and overwhelming at first. I knew I was good in math and I studied hard, and after a month and a half it became easier. You have to know that the first stretch is hard, but if you’re prepared, it becomes easier.

There were a few times where I was really frustrated, but the staff and everybody at Ryerson was like, “No, you can do it.” Ryerson offered us more time in the lab to learn coding because some of these things you cannot do at home. 

I’d like to be an inspiration for the Syrians who’ve just moved to Canada. I want to say to them, “Yes, you can start again. You can go back to school and you will succeed.” I know a lot of the new refugees have education but are scared and don’t know if they can do it here. I’m also an activist, so I’m involved with helping new refugees settle. I have friends who do workshops and teach English and I’m always emphasizing to them how important it is to complete education and study. 

You can make it. 

Where to study: Continuing Education

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.