founder

Hello, my name is Margarita González Saavedra, founder of ‘SEY-Sterren’. My passion as social entrepreneur, my drive to help talented people and my great interest in digitalisation and informatica have contributed to the foundation of SEY-Sterren.

In my 25 years of living in The Netherlands I personally experienced how difficult it can be to find a job when you don’t have the correct diploma’s, the right job experiences or simply when you’re not Dutch.

Personally, I got an education in marketing and communication in Chile. Afterwards, I started my career in The Netherlands with my greatest passion… Dancing! 😀
I have owned my own dancing school for 9,5 years, where I greatly enjoyed giving classes to lots of Dutch. My dance students didn’t come for the technique’s but rather for the fun times and good feeling they got. They were able to be themselves!
From here I was asked to counsel Dutch youth and adults who had various conditions such as ADHD or autism. This has led me to take on Total Coaching and to start studying for NLP-practitioner. With this received knowledge I have been working for more than 20 years as a personal development coach. I also started giving business training at companies, who have a large diversity of employees (for instance foreigners and people with conditions). Next to that I have created various projects for chamber of commerce organisations, governmental institutions and foundations.

The ICT branch has given me a lot of different coaching experiences.. For example, I was able to help a lot of professionals when the new working method ‘agile’ was implemented. For some professionals it was an immense challenge to adapt to these changes. Slowly I started to discover the connections between the ICT-world and the talented people sitting at home, not being able to use their qualities, or even worse, people who did not believe in their own capabilities and did not even know they were born for ICT.

After conducting market research for almost a year SEY was founded (March 2017), with the goal of retraining talented people into software testers (among others things), who can later work at the social enterprise SEY-Sterren.

SEY-Sterren is the testfactory of the North! As you all know, “Er gaat niks boven Groningen”. Just as there goes nothing above the high quality work and enthusiasm of our great colleagues! The best thing about our team is that our testers show great pride and passion for the job, as well as everyone being retrained into experts via our foundation.

How do I see myself and SEY-Sterren in the future?

That’s easy to answer, I see us grow as an organisation, professionals, team and of course as people. I myself am very proud of what I have been able to set up so far. This is something I also want to pass on to my colleagues and to all our involved clients.

I strongly believe in social entrepreneurship, collaboration and high-quality ICT services from which we can create sustainable chances for everyone.

“Shall we get a cup of coffee together?”