Part 2: Adventures in my first job out of full-time education
It’s been nearly a month since my last update, and it has been an incredibly eventful few weeks!
On the 16th of October I attended the Brighton Summit. Nikki Gatenby gave an amazing talk at the beginning which I found incredibly inspiring. I attended a few talks and learned about millennials and generations etc and how to take great photos on your phone (I’m going to use these tips for my personal Instagram!). It was also a great networking opportunity, which is something I’m not quite used to yet as I’m slightly shy, but this will hopefully get easier as I become more accustomed to it.
During the past month I even went to a ministerial event, which was a live screening of the launch of the Cyber Demonstration Centre with South-East Cyber Security Cluster. This was held at my old campus which was very odd as I hadn’t realised how much I’d changed until I was there to work and not to study.
Chris, our director, also gave me time (and tickets!) to attend TEDxBrighton, the theme for the event was Losing Control and I found the speakers absolutely fascinating. Another event I attended was an Advice Cloud hosted event on the 27th October, this was for our clients and was a wonderful opportunity for me to meet them face-to-face. We also heard from Jos Creese (who has previously written a blog for us), Jessica Figueras from Kable, and Naureen Kahn, techUK. It was held at the Digital Catapult centre which had a breath-taking view of St Pancras which you can see in the first photo.
I had the opportunity to attend a project management course, which was exceedingly beneficial as I had no experience in this at all. This has been crucial to getting a better grip on our aim in finding a programme management application, particularly during the tender processes such as G-Cloud and DOS. In the past weeks I’ve also written other, more specialised, blog posts about the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework, which have stretched my abilities as I struggled to find a more authoritative tone of voice.
So I’ve been learning a great deal about my new position, and after each experience, event or training seminar I realise I’ve learned a huge amount that I can apply to my role. I’ve still got a lot more skills to absorb but my confidence in myself and my abilities continues to grow. The amount of opportunities I’ve had I think are as a result of working in start-up SME which has a really inclusive working culture. I am being encouraged to continue learning and to keep developing skills. I feel like people listen to me and take me seriously which is something I’m finding exceedingly important because the transition from student to professional is more than just about a change in occupation it has also affected my sense of identity a little.
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