Andrew G.
About me
| Andrew G. | |
| Electronics | |
| Electronic Engineering | |
| Undergraduate | |
| Goodricke | |
| 1999 | |
| United Kingdom |
My employment
| Senior Consultant | |
| Monica Ltd | |
| United Kingdom | |
| Digital and IT services | |
| Medium-size business (50-249 employees) | |
| 2006 |
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A day in the life of a Senior Consultant in the United Kingdom
Software Services Consultant - solving software problems for companies who need a helping hand.
My career goals when I graduated
When I graduated, I just wanted to get into a graduate job, and feel valued in the role that I took. I wasn't sure where I wanted to go - but wanted a job that allowed me to discover what I was good at.
My career history
I had a graduate role within Motorola, which provided me with some good early training, and support for 3 years, before the dotcom crash affected the whole market, and I got made redundant. I moved to Manchester to work in a software services company, where I focussed much more on Software than I had previously. This led me to hear about opportunities with my current employer who were just starting up in the area and aggressively recruiting. I started work with them, committing to travelling all over europe to wherever there was work - I spent 9 months in Denmark, 3 months in Sweden, and also spent time in Amsterdam and London. As the company has grown, my responsibilty has grown with it - and I have been able to grow my experience in a number of different ways.
What has helped my career to progress
A willingness to travel is always valued by employers, and is a great way to expand your horizons. As you get older, this generally becomes harder, so its good to get it done early. Without my flexibility, I wouldn't have moved up the company as much as I have. Its also great to be in a growing company - there are always new opportunities both to take more responsibility but also to shape the company, and take control of your own career.
My advice to students considering work
Experience is everything - take any opportunity to do internships, or develop your own software. Anything that shows that you can work outside of the education environment will help you stand out (one chap I interviewed brought some hardware he had designed, built, and written software for, and talked all through the processes he'd followed - he got hired).
What I do
As a Senior Consultant in a Software Services company, I have a number of different responsibilities. My primary work is usually as the technical lead on a project, but I also support the sales team with technical pre-sales and estimation work. I also have line management responsibilities, looking after a small team of engineers and their careers. I also work as part of our corporate Project Office, helping to continually monitor and improve our corporate processes, learning lessons from the past, and working out ways to make us deliver more effectively.
Skills I use and how I developed them
My software development skills have been developed mainly "on the job" with a couple of early training courses that enhanced the basics of software engineering that I learned at York. Gaining experience working with other engineers, and seeing how different projects do things is a vital way of supplementing the theoretical grounding received at York. Project management, and line management has been a mix of on the job learning, again with some internal training courses to supplement the knowledge.
What I like most
As a services company, what we are working on is always changing. I could work for a big semiconductor company one project, a small app vendor the next, and maybe an automotive giant the next. My skills are firmly focussed on problem solving and being able to learn new things quickly. I learn something new almost every day.
What I like least
It's hard to become an expert in a particular field, when your focus is always changing. There is very little ownership of the work that I do - as it belongs to the customer, and is handed to them at the end of a project. I don't own a product - and often can't even tell people what I have worked on. Pride in my job has to be from the success of the company, rather than sharing the success of the products we have worked on.
What surprised me most
I joined the company in its first year of existence, when there were less than 30 of us, and we were purely focussed on the Mobile space. In the 9 years since I have joined, the company has grown across 3 continents to nearly 1000 people, working on multiple verticals. Its a completely different company to the one I joined, and moving from knowing everyone to only knowing a small percentage of my colleagues was a strange shift to make.
Next steps...
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