Jan joined Mobiquity over a year and a half ago. He talks about the importance of building meaningful relationships based on trust and positivity in order to achieve high quality teams leading to high quality products that enable the client’s growth and success. He also shares with us how he is leveraging his own expertise to give back to nature and how he plans to help others do the same.
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Jan van Dam: Although I was born in the Netherlands, I grew up abroad, which of course had a huge impact on defining me as the individual I am today. Growing up in Lebanon (from 0-2 years of age), Libya (2-4 years old) and Morocco (4-19 years old) taught me to embrace differences and recognise them for what they are: unique qualities.
Next to my family, I have 2 passions: sports and nature, of which the latter has gained significant importance over the last couple of years. When we were travelling through South East Asia last year and weren’t able to return home due to the Corona lockdown, my fiancée and I started thinking more about the earth we live on and our (lack of) contribution to it. That's why together with some friends, we are setting up a foundation that will focus on regenerating nature. It’s time for us to take responsibility and fix this mess we’ve created.
I started out my working career with a traineeship within the insurance industry. I soon realised that I would be better suited to a consultancy or advisory role, so I quickly made the switch to a large consulting firm. Since then, I have worked in many different areas such as process improvement, management consulting and digital consulting. Over a year and a half ago I decided to join Mobiquity, a digital experience agency with enough size to pack a punch, yet flexible enough to be nimble and leave room for entrepreneurship.
Although we are a fast growing company, we are not over-processed and so we have the ability to deliver high quality products within a short timeframe. As we hire many senior top talent it enables smoother collaboration between teams as we are all on a similar level of experience. It also facilitates more innovative and creative solutions as we utilise each other's experience and expertise. There is always a fun atmosphere and people are really friendly. What I particularly like is the way that Mobiquity takes pride in its employees portraying themselves in their own and unique way. Don’t be fooled though, this fun work atmosphere is underpinned by a very serious, dedicated and highly-professional work ethic.
I work within the Delivery team, focusing on a dedicated number of clients. My role involves a lot of collaboration and strategic thinking. It always starts with building the relationship between the client and Mobiquity by establishing trust between both parties. It is important to remember that first and foremost you are working with other people so you must take into account the human perspective. It’s all about how you interact with others and that is why I continuously work to develop and improve my interpersonal skills. There are many different players and influences, both internal and external, that need to be carefully considered and factored into my decision making. I enjoy this strategic element of the role and consider it almost like playing a highly political game of chess.
One of the clients I am currently working with is Manpower, a global professional staffing agency. We are helping them on their digital transformation journey to create a more valuable and engaging experience for their users. To do this we are currently developing and building an application for their users that will enable them to find and secure work in a quick and effective way. But we are not stopping there! Our goal is to further expand their digital capabilities and ultimately make this a highly personalised app that will provide the user, not only with suitable job openings, but also suggestions to upskill themselves, along with insights into the type of job and salary options that would become available to them should they choose to complete a particular course. We are currently rolling out the first steps of this plan, but I am looking forward to continuing to grow this partnership and realise our end goal together.
My family is essential to everything I do. Especially with my kids in mind, I’ve been triggered to double down on the foundation and really try to not only do my part, but also enable others to do theirs. Let's take responsibility! What I enjoy about my work is that we actually build something where we can see its value and impact on other people’s lives. The idea of the foundation is to leverage the expertise that I have to benefit nature. I build apps, that's what I know! So we decided to build a digital platform where a person can track their carbon footprint and find solutions on how they can neutralise that footprint. Essentially we are creating a marketplace to demonstrate good behaviour while making it very personal for the user. To show the true benefit of our actions we thought it would be interesting if you could actually see how much a planted tree is reducing your carbon footprint at any moment in time. To do this we are working on creating a measurable device that will monitor a tree and generate data which would link back to our application, so the user can see exactly how much they are offsetting their carbon footprint. Setting something like this up is always a struggle, but what isn’t? I am excited to see where this is going to take us.
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