Recently, one of our employees has reached a checkpoint.
Selma Kumrić – Omerović, who has been a member of Walter AEC since 2015, has become the Team Lead of one of our projects, and we thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to highlight all the achievements Selma has reached through the years of her work.
Selma was a member of the project from its early phases, starting her work as a consultant and proving herself as a dedicated member of the team, never leaving anything undone.
She proved her leadership skills as a Project Leader on many occasions at Walter AEC, always coming out on top of all the challenges and deadlines. Accidentally, Selma took the Team Leader role a couple of times already, filling in for absent TL’s, and she has always proven herself quite useful and resourceful, receiving nothing but praise along the way.
We acknowledged Selma’s leadership skills and are happy to announce that Selma has been promoted to Team Leader of the digitization team on one of our longest-lasting projects.
We must mention her colleague Semir, who said:
“I want to take this moment to congratulate her(Selma) for the new role of a Team Leader. Even though there is a bit of “grief” because our infamous Skype group won’t be able to have as many calls as we used to, lol. But, she’s a hard-working, highly organized person with qualities both as a person and a colleague. That’s why I firmly believe she’s more than capable of being a great TL.”
We also take this opportunity to congratulate Selma for her well-deserved promotion, further introducing some of the reasons which made her the perfect candidate and how an engineer copes with leading teams!
Let us talk you through Selma’s story and her career path!
Selma is a mom of a 2-year-old girl, and a 36-year-old husband, as she likes to say jokingly. Apart from being an incredible engineer and a team-lead, she is in love with cooking, drawing, and all different kinds of handcrafts.
But let’s go back in time a bit. Even during her college years, Selma was involved with architecture, working as an external associate for one of the local architectural offices. She claims that that experience was quite valuable for the start of her career.
Her full-time job, however, was quite a lot different from what she planned out and had in mind. Working at a furniture store was a job that she says didn’t suit her, but it still was her first “real” working experience.
Soon after that, she found herself working as a junior architect for one architectural office working on a big project of renovation of an old building in Mostar, which was declared a national heritage.
The particular position had a lot of benefits for her, as she had a chance to go through the whole process and learn a lot, but her private life plans of starting a family didn’t go hand-in-hand with the long working hours and the great amount of stress.
The next chapter in her career started when she saw an open job ad for Walter AEC when the digitization unit was looking for a new member.
Recently, Selma added extra responsibility to her work-life when she became a Team Lead. The combination of being an engineer and a Team Lead is something that she is new to, and is still getting used to. It’s a new role for her, and there are yet many things to learn.
Focusing on organizing work tasks for the team and helping them out with all technical or other issues that arise is her priority. The part that she says is tricky is finding a balance between the administrative and engineering parts, still being able to reach all the deadlines.
As a Team Lead, Selma communicates with the client, understanding their requirements and respecting the deadlines. Organizing projects, assigning them to people, keeping track of progress and issues that come about to resolve them on time, as well as updating the team members of all new information about work methods and changes in the administrative part, there’s plenty of responsibility for a Team Lead, but with her great leadership skills, we do not doubt that Selma will grasp it all quickly.
The role of the TL also requires some “human” skills. Recognizing the needs and affections of all team members, and helping them grow while communicating with them and making them feel comfortable, safe, and calm – that requires a “special touch”.
However friendly she is, and however much she cares about her team, there are certain obligations towards the clients. Making sure that all deadlines are met, along with according quality standards to please the customer is a part of being a Team Lead, as well. For that to come true, all team members must have the right assets to do the required work.
Let’s not forget about the part of the role that communicates with management, updating them about projects and all changes in general – that too should be taken into consideration.
Now, we get into the bit that talks about some of Selma’s strengths and weaknesses. Let’s turn to her Walter AEC colleagues to hear about her strengths.
As Tijana said, “Selma is someone I enjoy working with. She is willing to help her team succeed and meet the company’s goals. She is pleasant to be around and often has a positive attitude and treats the other coworkers with respect.”
And it turns out Faruk has a similar opinion: “I met Selma almost four years ago now. She was my initial contact when I applied for a job in Walter and has been an exceptional colleague and a great friend since then. Well organized, highly motivated, and responsible workwise, she is also very easy to talk to and always ready to joke and laugh.”
Seeing as her colleagues only have words of praise, we were interested in hearing from Selma about her weaknesses. There are some characteristics that she claims are challenging. Mainly, her being emotional. It gets troublesome when she experiences other’s problems as her own.
Interestingly, Selma also told us about some “advice” she would give her younger self.
“Be patient, and remember to be kind to yourself.” – which we find to be very inspiring!
After hearing about her nature and competencies, we had to ask ourselves what was the proudest and most difficult moment of her career so far.
Selma responded that the proudest moment of her career was the Team Lead role she was given. Her passion for further development and growth, by herself and with her team, gives her the motivation to be the best at what she does.
When it comes to the most difficult moment of her career, she mentions the stigma that is present in our country regarding the status of female engineers. As she had some unpleasant experiences herself, she said that there was a fear the stigma would follow her throughout her career. Thankfully, she got the chance to shine and go past the stigma, and the unpleasant experiences are a thing of the past as she claims she is right where she should be!
We will end this Career Path blog post with a comment from our colleague Vedad who said: “Selma manages every project with passion and helps our team to get better quality of the projects. Wish her good luck in a new position and I’m sure she will show good leadership skills in the forthcoming period.”