Noah’s Work Experience with Resolution IT
Last week, we welcomed Noah to our Guernsey office for a week of work experience. At the end of his time with us, he wrote this blog about his experience.
Hi, I’m Noah, and currently I’m taking A levels at the Sixth Form Centre. Over the past week, I’ve been shadowing different departments in Resolution IT, in order to get a better understanding of what the IT world actually looks like in action. Here’s a few insights into my time with the company.
First, I’m going to go over my time with procurement (a.k.a. buying stuff). This was where I was first introduced to how the ticketing software is used. I have to admit, I was fascinated with how well organised it was, considering all of the comments you hear about IT companies not responding the millisecond you send a message to them; it’s not their fault, they just have so many problems to deal with at once!!!
Next on the list was the helpdesk, which really cemented how busy this industry is; there were no breaks from the onslaught of tickets. Despite this, it was really interesting seeing how data was stored in the cloud, particularly the different structures that could be created. I was also shown a few of the [top secret] AI implementations within the organisation, which actually surprised me; there is so much discussion about how AI is going to take over the world, and about how there’s going to be a new Skynet, but there’s none about how useful it can be behind the scenes, provided it’s in the right circumstances.
For the halfway point of the week, I was (willingly!) kidnapped by the delivery driver, to help sort out some hardware. It was completely different to what the week had been comprised of so far; I was able to see what servers actually looked like, instead of just seeing simplified diagrams in computer science lessons. For the remainder of the day, I had a look into the accounting tools, in particular for invoices. Trust me when I tell you, it’s overly secure (like seriously, you would probably have to go through three people just to approve buying a coffee from Costa’s on the company credit card!!).
Then it was onto the software development team. This opened my eyes the most to how the industry actually operates. While the small coding projects I’ve undertaken have only been for stupid calculators that wouldn’t be that useful in the real world, here I was being walked through projects with tens of thousands of lines of code in them, with many different languages (albeit a few of them being the website ones), putting all of my personal projects to shame.
For the final day, I spent a bit of time learning how projects are “coordinated” (in other words how to shout at team leads when you want to find out who is doing what projects), which was quite a nice and relaxing end to the week!
Thank you to all of the staff, it really means a lot for you to take time out of your day/s to walk me through how you do jobs. I can assure you it wasn’t wasted, and it has set my expectations for my future career path in the correct direction.
