I started working in IT when the market was at its lowest, and it was during my Java course that the planes flew in the WTC. Not that this was the trigger for the recession in IT, the job started to dry up long before that. In this hectic time for IT, it was quite a struggle to get the necessary experience to find the jobs, but IT also offers a lot of possibilities. Just jump on the train, work hard and for most people there are interesting jobs to find, especially where business meets IT. The first company I worked for was not doing so well, so it was time to look around. Although the job market was tight at that moment, I got a couple of offers within a week or so. I decided to start working for The Vision Web, a 500 person company that had only existed for 5 years. This can be considered the turning point of my career. The Vision Web was based on the entrepreneurial capacities of all the employees and it was encouraged to start new concepts within the company. Each of those units was run like an independent business that was owned by the people that worked in it. In this way, you could also determine your own salary (which only worked in an upgoing market, by the way). Because of the loose structure, networking was also very important. Because of the open structure at The Vision Web (all the monthly reports were on the intranet, as well as the salaries of all the employees), I had a good view on the workings of a large company in bad weather.</p><p>I started as a tester ,and quickly thereafter as a test manager on a big project to make a web-based entreprise application for a big company. On of the nice aspect about testing is that there is a lot of communication with the customer. There are a lot of alignment aspects and it is also management of expectations. The first time from the developers point of view, later from the customer (acceptance testing), you learn very quickly how a team functions under stress, what the warning signs are for a failed project, how and when to make specifications and how to manage complex projects.This was also the time that I built up experience in specific business areas, health care, chain models and messaging. A huge national project was initiated where all providers in the care sector (3500) had to exchange messages with health insurers to facilate both the adminstrative and care processes. The health insurers communicated with other institutions as well, and messages went through different hubs where each participant was an independent organization. I found out that at each level of such a complex proces there were enormous challenges. Again, as with most dynamic IT projects, I learned a lot, mostly learning from your own and other's mistakes.