Work Experience program for Evan

Earlier this month we welcomed Evan to the team for work experience. We arranged a week-long program for Evan where he met with several of our team members to learn about the various roles at tiQtoQ. Evan shares more about his time with us:

Evan writes:

Hello, my name is Evan, and I spent my work experience week at tiQtoQ. They put a tremendous amount of effort into teaching me about their business and giving me valuable knowledge. During the 5 days, I learned something new every day while working remotely on my personal computer. Throughout my amazing week, I had Teams calls with several of tiQtoQ’s employees, who were all very friendly and treated me like an adult.

Day 1: Project Management

On my first day, I was introduced to the company by Pete Jones (CEO) and Paul Gitsham (CTO), who explained what the company does and introduced me to some of their clients like Allwyn and Vysiion. In the afternoon, I was introduced to Microsoft Azure and Jira by David Coffey, who was friendly and humorous. He showed me how the company uses them to work together as a team. tiQtoQ works remotely, and only has a small office used for meetings so these project management websites are highly important to the company.

Day 2: Manual Testing

Sarah Morgan taught me about manual testing, which is testing the software yourself, usually by having a checklist and ticking or crossing out boxes when going through some software, which is what Sarah got me to do. Later, I learned from Sarah Young, the People Director, about managing employees. Sarah Morgan later followed up to check my progress.

Day 3: Automated Testing

Naveen Bhati introduced me to automated testing, which uses code to run tests. Automated testing is different to manual testing, since Naveen must use code to run tests on software which potentially makes it more difficult, though it is significantly faster and more effective than manual testing. This was without a doubt my hardest day, since everything was difficult to understand. Later, Naveen called me again to ask if I had any questions, which he answered. He even used ChatGPT to help me understand and visualise his explanations and answers. Although challenging, it was very interesting and my favourite day.

Day 4: Media / Laws & Regulations

On my fourth day, I had a meeting with Ella Gitsham over Microsoft Teams. Ella explained how she operates the social media side of the company. She showed me their website where they use SEO tools to check their articles for its strengths and places for improvement before publishing. Later, I met Stuart Jones discussed systems management and presented on the laws and regulations the company follows.

Day 5: Writing this Blog

Paul Gitsham and I discussed my week at tiQtoQ. He asked me what I had learned. Answer: I learnt a LOT more being with tiQtoQ than I would have if I had been with anyone else. I learnt things like what a release pipeline is, APIs, and how they use graphs to show trends of defects/successes and loads more. Paul then asked me to write this blog about my experience.

Conclusion

To conclude, my week with tiQtoQ has been better than I thought it would have been. I joined tiQtoQ for an insight into what an IT career might look like, since I have an interest in IT. Considering I’m a 15-year-old boy doing his work experience, I honestly didn’t expect to walk away with as much as I have. tiQtoQ has treated me with respect and has treated me like an adult. Thanks to tiQtoQ, I would highly recommend anyone who is searching for somewhere to do their work experience to spend it with tiQtoQ. This is because they put in massive amounts of effort into making my experience valuable to me in the future.

Thank you, tiQtoQ!

Evan’s Mum wrote:Hi PeteI just wanted to say a personal thanks for Evan’s work experience which he thoroughly enjoyed and got a lot of value from.It was great to see him taking it so seriously, he really embraced all the sessions and was grateful that your team spent so much time talking to him and teaching him about what they do.You have obviously invested considerable time and energy, not to mention staff time, in supporting young people to gain valuable work experience and it was brilliant.Thank you again, Helen