Tell us about your journey discovering RPA.

My journey started when I came to Canada five years ago from Ukraine and I was very interested in programming. Earlier in my life, I received my degree in management and although I found the program interesting, I couldn’t visualize myself growing into the job opportunities long term. I wanted to try something else in a similar realm, so I started doing small projects on web design for my friends, family members, and anyone who wanted my help.

I quickly realized I really liked it, but I felt limited without having the technical background and knowledge. I could only do so much, and I really wanted to do more. I decided to come to Canada to learn more and get another degree in web and mobile application development, which I was very proud of and really enjoyed. Receiving a degree from college gave me a ton of practical experience. For example, I would build my E-store, a card game, and really cool things that I could show others. One time, I remember building a burger application where you could create your own burger with all the of desired ingredients and the application would calculate the total cost and calories for you.

At the end of my school term, I had an opportunity to stay and work as a traditional Java developer where I would develop applications, or try out advanced technology, that I didn’t know much about at the time – RPA! I thought it was amazing when I was first introduced to RPA – an opportunity where I got to build bots. I love having a software to help eliminate tedious tasks and making processes more efficient! After gaining new knowledge and using my certifications I received in my work, I started looking online for new job opportunities. After a lot of research and interviewing with other companies, I decided to call Reveal Group my home!

What is the most exciting highlight of your job and the projects you’ve worked on?

I feel like all the projects that I’ve worked on have been exciting because for me, the main purpose of doing the work that I do is seeing a happy client. Having a client tell me how innovative and how much easier their lives have been made from this program is something that I live for! I feel very empowered in my role on the Reveal Group team when I have clients thanking me for introducing this new technology to them. I feel my talents are recognized by not only them but to my team as well. I love to see clients join in on meetings expressing how much they love the work that me and the team have done; it decreases the deception rate, it does exactly what I need it to do, and I can’t imagine my work life without it. I really could not pick one project because all of them are very meaningful to me!

Are there any hobbies or interests of yours that you have seen becoming integrated with RPA?

In my free time, I’ve actually been working on developing an app! I’ve recently started to enjoy cooking more, trying out new recipes and just honing up on my chef skills in the kitchen. With all these new ingredients and new recipes, I was testing out, the problem I kept running into was that any time I would need to plan for a recipe, I would have to get specific ingredients for very specific recipes and because it is just me and my husband, I would be left with extra ingredients sitting in my fridge that I felt I couldn’t use. So, that’s when I started to build an app where you can give an input of the products that you have in your in your fridge or ingredients you want to cook with, have the app search the web, and give you top five recipes for those specific ingredients! It’s still in the works but I think with my background and the projects I’ve worked on within my time at Reveal Group, I want to branch out and help create something not only for our clients but for the world!

What can business users expect when working with a digital assistant?

There are a lot of processes that are manual, repetitive, boring and do not really need any judgement; it is just pointing and clicking. Instead of doing those repetitive tasks, people can now focus on something more exciting for their career, something that they actually like to do, something that makes them want to get out of bed in the morning. I find that when you do something that is very repetitive, you start making mistakes. It’s not because you don’t know the process, it’s that you’re getting tired so fast from the same thing over and over again.

This is where, truthfully, digital assistants can step in because they don’t get tired, and they don’t make mistakes. They just do what you tell them to do. They are super efficient, fast, and they allow you to have your coffee while you validate their results. With this luxury, now you can do something more meaningful, and more important your time.

Over time, I have seen clients using the processes and quickly saw how much they enjoyed using them. They would even come up with names for the bots and started treating them as another colleague or even a friend rather than something that they felt was taking away their jobs. We have had so many cases where employees worked overtime, sometimes 1-2 weeks behind schedule but when the automation would be implemented, it would process the backlog for couple of days and people would be up to date every single day so that’s where more people should start seeing the beauty of automation in that regard as well.

What advice would you give to someone looking into a career in Intelligent Automation?

From my personal experience, the huge benefit is to learn basic technical knowledge, low-level programming skills, so you understand how the logic works and how you need to build processes for them to work efficiently. There are a lot of free courses online and academic courses you can take to get a general understanding of how RPA works. Before entering a career in RPA, having the technical nitty-gritty details really helps you and your knowledge grow over time at a faster pace. I believe in the near future, we’ll be seeing more courses offered at universities in these fields because currently, a lot of people who are doing automation, are going around to other universities and hosting seminars to get more people excited about the products, opening their eyes to a new career that really doesn’t have the much exposure in the mainstream academics. Talking to those developers at seminars, taking aligned university courses or even free online courses to test out your skill set would be a great jumping off point on starting a career in the RPA space.

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