Dejan Guberinic

Advanced credit points: technical 20 · methodical 30 · communicative 40 = 90 points. For admission to the Advanced Level examination, iSAQB requires at least 70 credit points and at least 10 in each of the three competence areas — both are met. Together with the Foundation Level, two of the three admission hurdles are therefore cleared; the third (three years of full-time professional experience on at least two IT systems) is unproblematic in substance but still has to be evidenced formally.

Still missing: the examination itself — a written assignment of roughly 40 working hours plus a technical interview with two independent examiners. Cost €2,550 plus VAT. Credit points do not expire.

I did not decide at some point to go into IT. The technology was there before that. As a teenager I built my first websites with Dreamweaver and took apart the configuration files of games to understand what was going on underneath. None of that came through at school. My marks were poor, I was a daredevil, my environment was not easy. That is part of the story, but it does not describe what I was capable of, only where I stood at the time.

The turning point was the Bundeswehr. There I learned what structure and commitment achieve, and from that point on my qualifications and assessments were consistently very good. So it was never a question of ability, but of attitude. Next came vocational training as a Fachmann für Systemgastronomie (systems catering specialist). The subject matter was not a fit, which was clear to me early on, but I still did not want to drop out. In parallel I worked on software projects with two friends who were studying IT. What they did as part of their degree, I did on the side — but I did it.

In 2015 this became a company: Abramov Software GmbH & Co. KG, three shareholders with equal stakes. I was responsible for management, sales and the coordination of external developers, and I developed software myself at the same time. Our product rezeptfreies.info guided users via an interactive 3D model of the body to the affected region and from there to over-the-counter medicines that had been rated suitable in independent tests. In 2017 it received the BEST OF distinction of the INNOVATIONSPREIS-IT in the E-Health category. In 2019 we liquidated the company. Not because of a failure, but because each of us earned more in employment than the three of us did together, and because children and responsibility had changed our appetite for risk. The decision was uncomfortable and right.

After that came the bootcamp at neue fische, not primarily in order to learn, but in order to be able to evidence what I could already do. In Germany the proof counts for more than the trust, and I wanted to close that gap rather than explain it in every interview. The iSAQB training in 2023 came for the same reason: CPSA Foundation Level and, by now, three Advanced modules with 90 credit points in total.

In between were the years in consulting, at Acando and CGI in the retail and consumer goods sector, and afterwards as an IT Consultant at Aclue GmbH. Since November 2022 I have been a software architect and coach at the SIGNAL IDUNA Group. I advise development teams on architecture questions, develop enterprise-wide blueprints and standards, support teams in moving to the container platform and drive forward the adoption of agentic software development. Since 2024 I have additionally been working on Accessful, and since January 2025 as co-founder and managing director of Accessful GmbH, where I am responsible for the architecture and the technical foundation.

Without a degree I always had to know more and deliver more than applicants who had studied. That was fine by me, because this profession was never merely a profession. That is why I was glad to learn, and why I keep learning.