EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
BECOMING A HACKATHON EXPERT
Have you noticed how some of your students are very engaged when they have to work together to solve problems? During project-based activities, do they seem to naturally find their place in the team and divide their tasks according to their skills? Add to that their interest in web development, web and mobile design and such, and you might have a future hackathon expert in your classroom! Hackathon experts are people who organise or take part in a hackathon event. As an organiser or a participant, both profiles implies being an organised and creative team player! Find out more and scroll down to find the hackathon expert career sheet.
SKILLS
Find out about the key skills to become a Hackathon Expert.
Collaboration
If the teams participating in the hackathon must rely on individual strengths, make no mistakes: collaboration is the essential skill for both organisers and participants. To build a worthwhile challenge, the hackathon expert must collaborate with others.
Software Management
Hackathons gather multidisciplinary teams of professionals such as networkers, makers, developers, designers and business
experts. To challenge all of them, the hackathon expert, organiser of the event, must know the software they are working with to create a challenging competition.
Motivation
Organising a hackathon is not a piece of cake! Hackathon experts mobilize teams where the participants can be students, professionals, and the event can last 24 hours to 4 days. During the event, the organiser must be available for any issue the participants might encounter. Often, organisers are the ones reviewing the work done by the teams and announcing the winners of the challenge.
Creativity
Apart from organising a complex event, hackathon experts must show creativity to design challenging competitions participants. Whether it is prototyping a smart Internet of Things device or providing an impactful solution for a real-world problem, the hackathon expert must find the idea to bring the teams together.
Coaching
As an organiser of a hackathon, coaching is one of the keys skills for this job. If you are dealing with students, “your hackathon typically comes at the end of a preparation process. This is why it’s important to have coaches on board who can teach and introduce students to technical and operational systems, design thinking, business modelling or public speaking”.
Event Management
“Just as the teams participating in the hackathon, the people involved in organising and conducting it should be from multidisciplinary backgrounds. As such, you need an organisation team that is solely responsible for the organisational and logistical aspects of the hackathon. For this, it can be useful to have studied project or event management.”
Curious to
know more?
Meet Semyon Ovsyannikov,
Yvan Rooseleer and Wadih Zaatar
Semyon Ovsyannikov is Cisco Networking Academy Technical Manager. His main goal is to ensure program quality by engaging with leading training centres.
Yvan Rooseleer is the Managing Director at Belgian IT Academy Support Center (BiASC).
Wadih Zaatar is Business Development Manager for the DevNet Global Partnership Lead for Corporate Affairs.
The three of them contributed to the “Hackathon Expert’ career sheet and shared exclusive insights into their professional development and useful skills to thrive in the STEM field during the STEM Alliance Scientix webinar with Cisco: Experiences and Resources to Run an IoT Hackathon.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: all the materials and content presented on this STEM Job profile have been provided by STEM Alliance.
1 Comment
Selcuk Yusuf Arslan · 04/05/2021 at 9:24 AM
In the scope of Shape Your STEAM Career with Morphological Synthesis activity, we introduced some jobs profile through the Repository of STEM Jobs Profiles. We used morphological synthesis method to raise students awareness of new jobs such as Hackathon Expert. My students participated in some hackathons during the pandemic period. But they had no idea about this job. Thanks to these resources, they noticed that it is an amazing career opportunity! Thank you…
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