From EPAM to Entrepreneurship: How Two Women Launched Their Own IT Course

Business Analyst Daria Kupko and Project Manager Ludmila Grigorieva have spent many years in the IT industry. They have worked for some of the most renowned companies and have taught in various schools. At some point, they realized that they both had issues with the quality of education and decided to launch their own courses for those looking to change their profession or improve their skills. Thus, the project Climbity was born, aimed at those who want to learn more about project management and business analysis. We spoke with Daria and Ludmila to find out more about their collaboration and where the Climbity school is headed next.

“There Were Many Rejections and Tears”: Ludmila’s Career Path

Ludmila Grigorieva shares her story:

“By education, I am an economist-cyberneticist, having graduated from BSEU, also known as Narhoz. I started working as early as my first year at McDonald’s. It may seem like working in the food service industry is just about ‘bringing and taking,’ but in reality, the processes at McDonald’s adhere to lean manufacturing principles, which are easily transferable to IT processes.

In my third year, I was already a developer in a small Russian IT company, working on configuring databases. My tasks included creating analytical dashboards for various companies to help their owners understand their business operations. I worked there for a year, but it became boring. I was told what to do, but without explanations of who it was for, why it was needed, or what problem we were solving. I realized that if I continued, I would lose my motivation to work—I needed to make a change.

I compiled a list of companies I wanted to join and, in my fourth year, started actively attending interviews for a business analyst position. This was a challenging period—there were many rejections and tears… Eventually, I received an offer from EPAM and started working there. I handled internal projects, such as the corporate English language training portal, where company employees could sign up for any internal language course or webinar.

Now, I had access to clients and enjoyed seeing their satisfaction when we added functionality that sped up their work and addressed their pain points. Simultaneously, I began trying myself in the role of a project coordinator, assisting the project manager on large client projects. I started noticing that I was interested not only in business analysis but also in working with the team, setting up processes, delivering products to clients, and managing schedules and costs.

The only downside I identified for myself was that I no longer wanted to work in an outsourcing company. I was drawn to a product company to better understand users and have more opportunities for improvements. Thus, after 2 years at EPAM Systems, I began another round of job searching and joined Wargaming.

I spent 11 years at Wargaming, working on different products and in various roles: I was a system designer and feature owner. At Wargaming, I worked on 4 company products, including the flagship product World of Tanks and 2 unannounced products. I worked with different teams: from purely technical to highly creative (art) teams. And, of course, my favorite type of team was cross-functional, where specialists from different fields created cool gaming products together.

Since the end of 2023, I have been working at an international gaming company as a Game Producer—a combination of the duties of a product manager and a project manager. Additionally, since 2000, I have been working at an IT academy as a trainer in project management. The students who graduated from our academy found jobs in large companies.

For me, games are not just entertainment; they are a source of inspiration and creativity. I genuinely enjoy being able to create projects with a talented team that inspire people around the world.”

“Many Courses Are Useless”: Meeting Daria and the Birth of Their Own Project

During my time at Wargaming, Daria and I often met—she was a business analyst there, and I frequently needed her help with my features. Daria was always friendly and pleasant to communicate with, and we shared a common specialty.

Around 2013, we attended a conference together and had long discussions about the role of business analysis. We concluded that if analysts understood why they were creating certain products, it would be easier for them to solve problems, and many features and products would not need to be implemented.

In 2020, I took a break from teaching project management and thought about launching my own course—not a large-scale one, but small groups. Around the same time, I saw a post in Daria’s stories about development and wrote to her. We started discussing this topic and found that we had similar thoughts about education in IT and the current level of business analysis and project management: there is no validation of knowledge levels and the quality of teachers in the market, and many courses are useless. Often, someone who has recently completed courses and has a year of practice is already teaching and calling themselves an expert trainer. People pay significant amounts of money and end up disappointed in both the profession and the industry.

I don’t remember who first wrote a message like this: “You are great at business analysis, and I am great at project management—let’s create and launch our own course! We will train our specialists and focus on quality!”

In my experience, business analysts and project managers are often confused, and it is assumed that if you are a business analyst, you can also do project work. But these are completely different roles!

In our course, we decided that at the beginning, we would give students a foundation, and then they would decide which direction to pursue.