Paulo Brás – A journey from a Business Analyst to a Business Manager at ITDS

My ITDS story

My name is Paulo Brás and I am a Business Manager at ITDS. In this article you will get to know a bit of my personal story, why I moved from Portugal to Poland and how I ended up coming back to Portugal because of ITDS – stay tuned.

Poland? Why not…

The idea of moving to Poland came up in 2014. After graduating from ISEG University in Lisbon, I was working and concluding my Bachelor’s degree in parallel when a job opportunity for a Polish company appeared in one of my job feeds. Having a Polish girlfriend (one big motivation right?) and also always willing to work and study abroad, I decided to risk it and go to Poland, a country that had never crossed my mind in the past…

I started my Polish journey right up in the central north of the country in August of 2014, but quickly realised that the hot stuff was happening in the capital, Warsaw, where I moved to in December 2015 and stayed for 7 years.

During these 7 years I worked for a number of companies, including Accenture and Citibank, where I was introduced to the real workplace and the real skills to build a professional career. It was at Citibank where I started building my Business Analyst experience, by working on international projects with their clients. This allowed me to learn not only the business but also exposed me to the IT world, software, front-end, back-end, databases and working with different stakeholders across different levels of the organisation and across different functions.

It was like doing the University all over again, but now in the real world!

ITDS? Never heard of them, but they seem to be cool…

It was during my time at Citibank that I had the chance to meet and work with Danylo Komarynski, who had just joined ITDS as a Senior Consultant. Back then I was looking for new challenges and new experiences, maybe abroad once again, and I happened to mention this to Danylo.

This is when I heard about ITDS for the first time. Through ITDS Internal Recommendation Program Danylo was able to quickly present my profile to HR and arrange an interview with me.

The rest – I’m sure you know how it goes 🙂 After a very pleasant recruitment process with ITDS’ lovely HR ladies (I invite you to meet with them!) I was on-boarded on my first project at Credit Suisse – and the rest is history!

In summary, ITDS has given me the opportunity to work with 2 major international clients.
I was able to grow my career at a speed that, in normal conditions, would take me 10+ more years to achieve!

I worked as a Business Analyst and grew into a Team Lead & Architect of Data Governance Software. I had the opportunity to travel to India to learn and become a specialist in Leasing Software based on Salesforce. I also had the opportunity to implement the same software into a client based in the UK.

ITDS gave me the freedom to work on amazing and challenging projects across the world, to learn new technologies and to grow professionally and personally, with always the same motto – Work hard, party harder! If you have everything under control, then you are not driving fast enough!

Portugal? Why not…

Whilst working for ITDS’s clients and on various projects, I’ve always wanted to support the company, help it grow and scale the business, which is something I raised with the CEO, Charles Gamba, from day one. The answer was “yes, there is always an opportunity for everyone to get directly involved with ITDS and support its growth”.

So from my first day of onboarding at ITDS, it has been clear in my head that I wanted to be part of this group of people (back then 75, right now 400+) and help them grow in the best way I could.

Fast forward 4 years, I am now a Business Manager at ITDS full-time, responsible for opening the brand new office in Porto, Portugal, acquiring new clients and embarking on this exciting challenge that is to grow the ITDS brand in the portuguese market.

If you want to know about the many other things I’ve done at ITDS, feel free to reach out to me and I will be more than happy to tell you all about them over a coffee in one of Porto’s cafés 🙂