From Huawei ICT Competition Award Winner to Joining Huawei

I joined Huawei four years after triumphing at the Huawei ICT Competition.

My participation in the competition made my transition from education to work fairly smooth. After graduating in 2018, I joined a Huawei partner company, and was promoted to technical director a year later. In 2022, after rounds of recruitment interviews, I joined Huawei as an IT technical manager responsible for project delivery and O&M.

I think I was offered a job at Huawei thanks in part to my previous ICT experience and because I had won an award at the Huawei ICT Competition. I am grateful that the competition helped me build a bond with Huawei and motivated me to keep learning and improving my skills. Through the competition, I learned a lot about ICT and related skills, including how to work as part of a team. My experience from the competition also helped me during job interviews.

16 hours of experiments each day

I will never forget the summer of 2018 when I participated in the Huawei ICT Competition, which has regional championships before the global final. My team, Guilin University of Electronic Technology (GUET), had won the China-region championship that year and earned our place in the global final. The finalists, a diverse group of 69 contestants from 18 countries, gathered at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen, China, for the 3rd Huawei ICT Competition Global Final. We had beaten out more than 40,000 students from over 800 universities across 32 countries to get this far. After intense rounds of competition, my team and I took home second prize in the Cloud Track category (Figure 1).

One of the most unforgettable experiences was the training before the competition. Every morning at 9 a.m., we arrived at the training room to run experiments. There were many servers and switches running in the room, but I found their humming in the background comforting rather than annoying. My teammates and I were so immersed in experiments, configuring storage devices, simulating network topology, and setting up virtualization environments, that we often did not leave until after 1 a.m. (Figure 2). The intense experiments and pre-competition training greatly improved our practical abilities.

The global final consisted of an eight-hour experiment. During the competition, one of the biggest challenges for our team was FusionCompute node installation, where we found an error halfway through. We reviewed the simulation operations that we had practiced each day, checked the installation process, and began troubleshooting the cause. Eventually we fixed the problem, but we had fallen about two hours behind, even though we had worked as fast as possible, and did not have enough time to finish all the experimental questions. We had lost our chance to win the title but I was still very proud of my team and our achievements.

After the competition, we returned to our university and shared our experiences with other students. The following year, at the 4th Huawei ICT Competition, the GUET team won first prize in the Cloud Track category at the global final, helping me let go of my regret. In addition, my teammate Wei Mingxin was offered a teaching position at our university after graduation, and has mentored GUET students participating in the Huawei ICT Competition for several years. At this year's global final, the GUET team won the Grand Prize in the Network Track and Cloud Track categories in the Practice Competition.

Promoted to technical director after one year

For me, one of the most important benefits of participating in the Huawei ICT Competition was improving my hands-on skills. The competition involved very accurate simulations of real-world environments, which helped me a lot during my first few years of work.

My experience at the competition also paved my way into the ICT industry. After the competition, I passed the Huawei Certified ICT Expert (HCIE)-Cloud Computing certification and this helped me later on when I joined a Huawei partner company after graduation in July 2018.

Initially, I was a project delivery engineer responsible for setting up, maintaining, installing, and commissioning cloud platforms for customers. Thanks to my hands-on experience before and during the Huawei ICT Competition, I quickly became familiar with my work, and smoothly transitioned from a fresh graduate into a qualified professional. I often encountered challenges, but with the product knowledge and skills that I had learned when preparing for the competition and my experience from previous projects, I was able to quickly identify and fix problems and overcome challenges.

Having excelled in my position, I was promoted to technical director in less than a year. I began to undertake delivery and technical assurance for the company's key projects, while managing a team of more than 20 engineers.

Experience earned me the Huawei job offer

In 2022, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Huawei. At the interview, I introduced my experience in the Huawei ICT Competition and presented my HCIE-Cloud Computing certificate, as both showed my passion and dedication and could increase my chances of receiving an offer. The interviewer was very impressed with my experience and said, "I'm confident that you are qualified in terms of technical skills since you did so well in the global final of the Huawei ICT Competition."

In addition to improving my theoretical knowledge and practical skills, the Huawei ICT Competition introduced me to Huawei's latest technologies. During the competition, I got to know some Huawei engineers who helped me understand Huawei's corporate culture. Since then, I have worked with Huawei's products and services on a daily basis. I have developed a deep understanding of Huawei's products and solutions, and accumulated more hands-on experience through major projects. I could already easily fix any problems that customers encountered during O&M. I am sure that my experience at the competition laid a solid foundation for me to join Huawei at a later point in my career.

I am currently working as an IT technical manager at Huawei, but I am still learning. ICT is evolving and converging rapidly. Therefore, in addition to participating in skills contests organized by the company, I have been learning new skills and improving my knowledge. I recently passed the required exam and earned the HCIE-Big Data certification.

Just as eagles are born to fly, and horses are born to gallop, I feel like I was born to do this. This is where I belong.

The Huawei ICT Competition runs every year, and every year it gets bigger and better, with more students participating and new tracks included. I look forward to seeing more college students challenge themselves and launch their future careers by participating in this competition.