Career Pathways

Career Pathways

‍We take pride in offering a structured and comprehensive work experience program for individuals at all stages of their careers. Our goal is to nurture professional growth throughout the entire career lifecycle.We recently launched a new Career Pathways initiative for permanent employees, designed to support their growth and development. This initiative reflects our commitment to providing clear and structured opportunities for career progression.We previously shared Dan's story of progression from work experience to permanent employment, and last month we welcomed Tom to spend a week with the team.

Tom writes:

"Hello my name is Tom. This week I have spent my year 10 work experience at a company called tiQtoQ who are a software testing business.On Monday i started the week’s work experience off with Pete Jones who is the CEO and Paul Gitsham who is the CTO who ran through what the company does and all the different types of services they provide. It was a great start to the week as it gave me good context for the rest of the week.I then had a meeting with Dave Coffey who looks after business intelligence and reporting. Dave showed me all the different types of software they use including JIRA, Devops, and Hubspot. These are tools that are used for project management and sales management.Then on Tuesday I spoke to Sarah Morgan. Sarah is a Test manager and she set me tasks like going through a  test site and running some tests. She also does manual testing which is a Tester acts as an end user and checks the software for any bugs or to validate if the code delivery works.On the Wednesday I spoke to Naveen.  Naveen is the head of AI and automation testing, who introduced me to automated testing which I thought it was extremely clever on how it works. Automated testing is where the tool tests for any bugs or faults in the software. I was surprised how quick and efficient it was, it provides massive value for the business as it helps deliver quality products to market very quickly.The next day I then met Stuart Jones who is responsible for systems and compliance. Stuart is the head of systems and compliance and showed me the safety systems they use to make sure no one can hack and be violent towards the company. After that Stuart then set a task for me to create my own SharePoint site which was so much fun.

Feedback

Finally to end off my work experience, I spoke to Pete to give him some feedback of how I felt this week went. I also did some more testing in a test environment with Richard Wheaton which was also good fun. This testing with Richard was manual testing which I personally preferred as I really got to understand the software.During my spare time at the office, I met Dave Kelly. Dave is the test program director, and he set me program planning activities. These activities included transferring data to Dave to keep his spreadsheets up to date.Doing work experience with tiQtoQ taught me how the company runs and what each person does as their job and most importantly what manual/automated testing is. Not only that but they taught me what it means to want to learn new and exciting things.

In Summary

Overall I think that doing this week’s work experience really helped put something into my mind for a future career. By watching and learning what each person does at tiQtoQ, every day is something different which is what really made me feel that software testing is always new and exciting each and every day."