Most career paths are often a series of restarts, of fine-tuning interests and passions, and matching those with appealing opportunities. Yamina Trouchaud’s path to thriving at Conduent is a great example. Yamina, a team leader in Transportation Services who works in Conduent’s office in Valence, France, is an expert in fine-tuning her career path, and making incremental improvements to her toolbox of skills to prepare for exciting new opportunities.

More than a decade ago, it was the hospitality and tourism industry that piqued her interests and lead Yamina to complete a master’s degree in business administration, focusing on hospitality and luxury brand management. Then, project management caught her attention, and she worked several years as a project manager for IT companies. Through that job, she developed an interest in the development of technology solutions, including software engineering and development. The next step, then, was figuring out how to make the leap from project management to software development – a fun new challenge!

“What has always guided my choices professionally is my search for challenges; I love to learn, and I need to be challenged,” Yamina said. “If you want to flourish, you have lots of opportunities to learn new things, to challenge yourself. In this case, I decided to go back to school, because I wanted to work with engineers, with developers, and I needed to learn their language, to be able to talk with them and understand their language; if they don’t believe you understand them, it is hard for them to see that you have something to offer, something that can help them.”

Fine-tuning her interests, increasing her knowledge and skills paid off when an opportunity opened for a lead developer about a year ago at the Conduent office in Valence; Yamina got the job and joined a team working to develop web services, primarily digital payment and ticketing services, for transit and transportation clients across Europe and beyond. Then, within five months of joining Conduent, Yamina was tapped to be a team lead, her current role. Yamina is quick to point out that she is not an engineer, but her team recognizes and values the unique skillset she brings to her team lead role.

“I think that my background gives me different insights, fresh perspectives, things that they can use, that can help them,” Yamina said of her development team. “Engineers often are focused on intricate technical solutions, and a different perspective, a broader view, broader consumer perspective, can be helpful. I think they appreciate my different perspective, and it allows them to focus on their work, because their work is very important and crucial for our clients, who need our solutions for their operations to be successful.”

It’s interesting how professional passions can intersect and evolve. Yamina, for example, sees her current role leading a team of developers creating transit payment solutions for international clients (such as the public transport system in Paris, France, which is preparing to host 2024 Summer Olympics) as an extension of her initial interest in hospitality and tourism. “To me, what I do today is directly connected to the tourism industry, because we’re developing applications that will help people go easily and efficiently from one place to another,” she said. “And because Conduent is such a global company, I have opportunities daily to talk to clients and coworker all over the world. That has really fed my interest in traveling and seeing more of the world. It’s a very exciting job and company.”

Yamina says she is very fortunate to be part of Conduent, where she believes opportunities abound. “My experience is that if you show you have something to bring to your team or your organization, and you are proactive, there are many opportunities. It was very important for me to find a company that shares the same values, my values. We focus on people; we care about people. We are one team, and I know that I can go to anyone in the company and they will give me help or support. There is a real sense of commitment, that we all share and support each other. We share the same values, and that is what matters.”