Alumnus of ASU Tells about His Work with Toyota and Rosatom

Ivan Shtrigel, an alumnus of Astrakhan State University and currently a staff member of Rosatom Corporation, met our students and told them about his career path. The meeting was held as part of the project “Experience of Generations” that is executed by our Unit of Russian-Asian Cooperation and our Chair of Asian Languages.

Ivan Shtrigel used to study at our Department of Mathematics & Information Technologies. Under Professor Vladimir Smirnov’s supervision, he and his groupmate developed a package of virtual lab workshops in Microelectronics. He confessed that this is when he realized how crucial it is for a programmer to be an erudite ready to learn new things. Development of new software may relate to any field – from Arts to Medicine; it means a programmer ought to know that field well.

Astrakhan State University has been making contacts with foreign partners for a long time. In particular, Japanese language courses for technical specialties were launched at ASU; they were one of the initial steps in Ivan’s career. He remarks: “A good translator is a professional who knows both his profession and the field in which he or she translates”. This was the goal that the University administration set itself. Our technical students were taught the appropriate Japanese vocabulary – translation of special terms, notions, and signs. They were trained for further work at large enterprises. Already six months after starting to learn Japanese, Ivan Shtrigel went to his first practical training at the joint venture of AMO ZiL (a large Russian vehicle producing company) and IHI Corporation (a well-known Japanese producer of transport-related machinery). It was an uneasy job for the beginning translator; his Japanese was too limited to provide an efficient translation, but his continuous practice and a patient attitude of his Japanese supervisor helped him grow as a specialist. Ivan took part in a number of engineering language training programs.

In 2012, Ivan was sent to Japan, where technicians speaking both Japanese and Russian were demanded. He told about Japanese people’s special approach to work: “They taught me that the phrases “I understand” and “I know” must be used very neatly”. Japanese specialists differentiated several gradations, beginning with “I know that in theory” to “I can handle the process and introduce improvements”. In their opinion, should a problem arise, the main task of management is to analyze it and identify the causes why a staffer made a mistake to help him or her correct it.

After his training at Toyota, Ivan’s career passed thru several stages; he finally became a project manager at the Rosatom Corporation; he is in charge of production systems development. Rosatom is a global technological leader; it is one of Russia’s largest companies. Its developments related to production systems are applied at the national level. For example, its projects are applied at medical institutions as part of the global project “Lean Medical Facility”, which helps reduce queues significantly.

At the end of the meeting, Ivan Shtrigel names several basic principles for students of ASU, if they wish to make a good career:

• Sustain your versatile development; do not limit yourself within your specialty;
• Master foreign languages;
• Develop your communication and socialization skills.