Day 12

Today we went to Hewlett-Packard and the Prague College. HP was interesting because she spoke about their hiring and training process. They focus more on individual people and their skills. The interview process is an assessment test where each individual has a task. By doing these tasks it identifies each person's skills and then human resource decides if they are selected for the next interview. HP is present in over 170 countries with 324,000 employees. They spoke about a new style of IT which involves printers and personal systems, converged infrastructure, and HP software.

HP's training involves each new employee getting a mentor to show them around. This is called the Young Guns program. Then after about 6 month period the new employees could decide if they wanted to continue working or find something else. They are very focused on new graduates and really appreciate them and try to find the perfect career for them. They also mentioned a new program they're implementing at the Czech location. It involves the younger employees mentoring older employees about the new IT systems. It is very new and they have a few problems but
 they are excited for the outcome.

The Prague College has 600 students with a business, IT networking, and arts program. They seem very student focused and about 80% of students are placed with a job or continue their education. After the presentation, we broke into groups and each group spoke with a professor. Our professor was from the UK and he spoke about the cultural differences in Czech and UK. He said that Czech is still very socialist and more introverted. We all noticed how customer service was definitely not like America. He also agreed, and said he goes to Germany just to grocery shop because they are nice. He also said Hard Rock Café and TGIF's is his favorite restaurants because of the cultural atmosphere the restaurants offer.

After that a large group of us went down into the neighborhood around the college which was a little bit more developed than the other parts of the city like the Old Town that we were used to seeing.  The wait-staff at the restaurant we went to was more friendly and accommodating than most of the other places we went to.  We were so used to waiters being short with us and not friendly, but I feel that's because the area we were in wasn't so heavily trafficked with tourists so it may be that their tolerances for tourists and people are a lot higher than that of a waiter who only serves tourists.  Tomorrow is our free day off so we get the who day to do whatever we want.  About time!  I'm going with a group of people to the highest point in Prague that leads to a tower which was recommended to us by our tour guide Petr.  We're also going to the gardens and the Parliament building.