In 2005 I had just left secondary school, dropped out of college anddidn’t know what to do with my life. That was when the opportunity to apply fora Software Development Apprenticeship appeared and I embarked on this journeythat has led me to where I am today. 

 

Right at the point when my professional career was about to start,having completed my apprenticeship, the 2008 recession hit and I was maderedundant. After almost a year of job-seeking, voluntary work and experiencinglife on benefits (and a fair amount of surfing) I started to feel like I wasbeing left behind even though I was eager to progress. That is when I decidedto book an interview with the Redruth AFCO. Swiftly after this interview, I wasaccepted for a career in Trade Group 4 as an ICT Technician and before I knewit I was waving farewell to a teary-eyed mother at the train station as Iheaded to RAF Halton. 

 

The first 6 years in the RAF were exciting and filled with stimulatingexperiences and opportunities. But as time went on, I realised that I was goingfrom month to month with no progression. The work labelled ‘IT’ was no morethan administration and paperwork and my passion within the RAF began todwindle. I tried to stick it out to reach my 12-year point but by my eighthyear, my interest in the IT industry had essentially diminished. Having PVR’d(military talk for voluntarily withdrawing yourself from service) at 28 Imanaged to land another apprenticeship in Industrial & CommercialElectrical Installations. 

 

Starting this apprenticeship, it felt strange being a “civvy” again.But what I came to realise as I was completing my third apprenticeship was thatI would always be playing catch up. Even if I worked as hard as I possiblycould at being the best electrician I could be, I would still be more or less10 years behind. This alongside other personal issues led me into a bit of adownward spiral – I was depressed, angry, anxious, exhausted and poor and Icrashed. 

 

During this period, I was encouraged to reach out to people forsupport. I reconnected with old friends, two of which were Tom and Dan; twoblokes I had met when they joined the RAF. Little did I know that reaching outfor support would gain me a new career! Tom and Dan were now proudly two of theCo-Founders of Power 365. They began floating the idea of working with them andeventually won me over. My career at P365 started on 4th January 2022 and Ihaven’t looked back since. 

 

For the first time in my life, I am genuinely excited about the workthat I am doing. I am working with a fantastic group of people hand-picked byTom, Dan and Carl – all of whom are like-minded and driven. I have the abilityto work anywhere, so long as I can connect to the internet.  I work for acompany that genuinely invests in its employees in terms of training,equipment, and many other benefits. They want to give us the best possiblechance of delivering the best quality product for our clients, and with theother people in this company, there really is a breadth of knowledge andexperience to lean on when in need. One of the strengths of this growing teamis the breadth in depth that we have, as a collective, to produce a resilientproduct that people can trust. 

 

The work that I have been doing since joining is genuinely interestingand exciting. It seems like a month can’t go by without a new development beingreleased, be it an updated UI for navigating Dataverse, the ability to createPower Automate flows directly from your Canvas app, or a new Canvas appintegration visual in Power BI, there is always something to do or learn. Thisbrings me to another contrast between my present career and past careers isthat we are actively encouraged to learn, use and understand these new systems,and to find new ways of working that strengthen our collective knowledge, andwe have an open forum through Microsoft teams in which we can share ourfindings with the team and talk about information that can help others. Weroutinely meet and talk about what has happened, what we have been working on,and any useful things we have learnt. And I am encouraged consistently to becreative, to fail and most importantly to embrace failure and learn from it.All of this lends itself to being creative, innovative, and consistentlyimproving both ourselves and our products. 

 

All of this is made so accessible by the “new age” of Microsoftproducts, in particular the Power Platform which is the area that I am workingin now. Back in 2008, when I was building websites using ASP and ASP.Net andcreating intranet pages for the company I worked for, everything was so complicated.We had a team that were the database specialists using SQL Server and MySQL andthey were teaching me about inner joins and many to many relationships and howI would interface that into my search queries - it was so complicated. When Iwas made redundant it all looked like I would never achieve that ability tocreate programs and websites.  With the Power Platform, it is literallyall right there, in plain English. 

 

I no longer feel like I am being left behind and having to play tocatch up – I have been given a fantastic opportunity to stretch my skillset. Ifeel like I am growing, developing and strengthening my skills while workingwith and for people that I can genuinely say that I care about and who careabout me, which is a first.  There are undoubtedly big hills to climb infront of me, but I can’t wait to get to the top of them and take in the view. Idon’t wake up dreading the day ahead, I wake up ready to go. One of the mostsatisfying parts of this is to see and hear how my work is being appreciated bythe client, and that is one of the reasons why I enjoy doing this so much. 

 

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