A retail systems-focused IT engineer, first-class Computer Science graduate and trailblazing in the field of customer-focused IT…

Maximising opportunities, being bold, always learning. These are the three principles that I have always used to make decisions, and live my life by every day. It’s allowed me to reach the heights of where I am today.

Whilst since the earliest years of my life, I have always had a deep intrigue into technology, things didn’t really get started for me until around 2010, when I was placed on my primary school’s gifted and talented register for IT. In the beginning, I did face some unique challenges that some of my peers may not have – many of which at the time, somewhat upset me…but nowadays, I see and realise the strengths that it has equipped me with, to go out into the world, fighting, and stronger as a person than ever. I can still vividly remember whilst many of my peers were interested in the latest video game, or out playing football, I would be experimenting around as a nine-year-old, trying to install different versions of Windows on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, pushing my poor father’s desktop PC right to its limits.

Soon after this, my friends and immediate family began to realise my IT skills, and they began to bring their computers to me to repair. One of the repairs I remember carrying out the most, was this HP laptop I was given to repair by one of my mother’s friends – which had suffered an unfortunate coffee spill. The laptop wasn’t the concern…but the ~5,000 family photos that weren’t backed up from the laptop were. It was around this time that I first became aware of different hard disk technologies, and purchased (with the help of my parents) my very first SATA to USB adapter which I still own and use today. I was able to identify, and rescue, all of the photos, and provided the customer with about eleven DVDs of photos. Whilst I, of course, enjoyed the challenge of recovering the pictures, even as a ten-year-old, what I enjoyed the most, was making someone else’s day. This simple sense of satisfaction carries through to the work that I do to this very day.

Throughout my time at high school, my interest into technology and IT systems further developed, this was around the time where I started to really learn, in a deeper sense, how a computer worked. My ability was very quickly identified, and I was an inaugural member of the school’s computer science club, which was designed for key stage four students, but I was allowed in as a year seven. During the time of my GCSEs, of course, I took the opportunity to study both IT and computer science (as well as engineering, something which I thoroughly enjoyed). In my computer science examination, I was (at the time) the highest achiever within the school, achieving a final grade of 97%.

At the end of my GCSE time, I knew that I wanted to eventually study on towards university, so I joined my school’s Sixth Form for a further two years of study. I am not going to shy away from the fact that this was an extremely difficult part of my life, and I ultimately struggled a little more at my A-Levels. I was one of a handful of students that undertook the study of four A-Level classes, these being Media Studies, Economics, the OCR Level 3 Cambridge Technical Introductory Diploma in IT, and the AQA Level 3 Foundation Technical Level IT: Cyber Security. It wasn’t necessarily the difficulty and study involved with these classes which caused trouble, but the fact that so much was going on within my life at the time. I had just started working at the age of sixteen (and was struggling at the time), and was also dealing with the pressures of learning to drive. Despite this, I persevered, and managed to exit with a still impressive set of A-Level results, gaining two Distinction* grades in the IT subjects, a B in Media, and a C in Economics. At the time, I also set up my home network system, which still runs today.

Outside of Sixth Form at the time, a lot of events in my life were taking place. On May 5, 2017, I attended a job interview at my local Co-operative society’s food division for the role of a simple general assistant. Something that, at the time, I only saw as a Saturday job. I was offered the role on the same day, and began working for the society on August 15, 2017. To say that this job changed my life, is a complete understatement. Throughout my time in the role, I had access to a management team, who took me from a lazy sixteen year old who was identified as ‘poor’ on his first appraisal, to a valuable team member less than six months later. From 2017 until 2020, I was happy with working as a general assistant.

So, at the point of completing my A-Levels, and awaiting entry into university, like all students, I was pretty much idle from May until September 2019. In this time, I took one of my slightly admitted, more unusual interests, to a whole new level, this being vintage Sky Digital satellite boxes. In June 2019, I formed the ‘Old Digibox’ community and Discord server, which today, has amassed almost ~200 members. Whilst this was very much a hobby, this exposed me to a number of useful skills which I use today, including hardware, embedded computing devices, and to a certain extent, soldering and firmware modifications. The results of which, not always orthodox.

In 2018, I completed my UCAS application, to five universities, and received offers from all five, however, in the end, I chose to study a BEng Honours degree in Computer Science at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Despite being known as the ‘maniac’ who chose to commute in from Chelmsford every day, and traversed the notorious M11 motorway in his little Ford Fiesta, the three years of this degree could not have been more of a contrast from Sixth Form. I immediately settled into the course, obtaining a grade of 97% in my first ever assignment, Fundamentals of Design. It was at this time when I first began to learn the C# programming language.

In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was lucky enough not to have been furloughed, as I was very much still within the food retail area. In October 2020, after developing a strong positive reputation both with my local customer base, and my colleagues, I decided to take the monumental step, and trained up to become a supervisor, a position that further strengthened my resilience. I was officially signed off, and promoted to the position in December 2020, with my first shifts as part of the local store’s management team taking place in January 2021.

Things carried on this way for the next few years, as I completed further years and modules in my degree course, maintaining a module average of around 85%, placing me firmly in the bracket for a first-class classification at the end of the course. I finished the course in May 2022, submitting my final dissertation, whilst fighting off COVID. With the degree finished, the next battle started. I needed to assess my situation with my career, and whilst being a retail supervisor was a fantastic stop-gap, everybody knew that I needed to move into the field of IT.

This was a journey in itself, and I applied for graduate schemes in some well-known firms, ultimately falling short of the psychometric tests at each of them. I was dejected, and desperate (it didn’t help at the time that I badly also developed a desire to own a Mini Cooper, and was prepared to treble my supervisor shifts to get one). But what I didn’t know…was that I was missing the biggest, golden opportunity, right in front of me. In mid-2022, a position within my local Co-operative society’s IT department became available, of which I jumped on the chance to take.

And this leaves me where I am now, in my momentous journey of life, currently working as an IT technician for the very society that I joined all the way back in 2017…and to say I am enjoying it is an understatement. Within the role, I am further developing not only my knowledge of retail IT systems, but also learning to become a better human, whilst having the opportunity to use my customer service skills to offer a truly personal, and empathetic IT service to all of our trading divisions. At the end of the day, the customer remains at the heart of everything that I do…..

….and I finally got that Mini Cooper in September 2022………….