STEM ambassadorship – my experience
One of the best managers I ever had in BT was a gentleman called Jeff Patmore. Jeff was a senior manager who had come in to BT as an apprentice. He was clever, experience and very talented. Who wouldn’t want to work for someone like that? 
Prior to working for Jeff, I had considered leaving BT and working as a contractor: I was recognised as a good programmer and mostly could do the usual work load on a Monday. I wanted to be working at the next level but was finding promotion difficult.
Jeff gave me some challenges and more importantly the experience I lacked in achieving more in a large company. Jeff was also keen that I gave some of that back. I’d spoken to Jeff about my early career (working through the Commodore 64 user manual then the next level programming manuals, then taking other people’s programmes as frameworks for achieving our families goals) and my college and university experiences.
I didn’t start coding at 10 with a view to being a professional coder. I didn’t know what I was doing was anything special. All the pi-jam equivalents and taster days at school did not inform me that this was what I should be considering as my life. I am so glad I stuck with it.
I thought the ambassador programme with STEM would help me help the up and coming generations to work that out before they got on the wrong course at university. (This really happens. Please ensure you have something you are reasonably passionate about studying for 3-4 years. If you don’t and you quit after 2 months, drop it from your CV and get a job fast. These gaps do not make you a great employee on paper – strange but true).
How to develop a career
The subtext here is as a programmer, but it does translate.
Get experience: mine was on the playground and I never counted it. Actually what that demonstrated was a will to sell and see how far my “product” would get me. I made no money to speak of, but I enjoyed learning how to make my code work on other machine and I liked people saying wow to something I created.
I still like these things. What I do now is way more impressive.
When someone is hiring they essentially look for three things: loyalty, honesty and ability. Sometimes I swap ability for drive or ambition, but essentially your first job, as a programmer, you don’t have much ability. So I am looking for something else and that’s determination to learn.
Most jobs have boring and difficult bits: without your willingness to learn, you are essentially a one trick pony.
We see from the image that you have a degree, yet you’re not talking about that?!
No, I’m not. I saw my degree as giving me proof of ability and loyalty and honesty. Some people who hire do not view degrees that way.
I understood from my early programmes, that computing was a huge and complex subject. My degree opened up my mathematical and computer science experiences and developed them. It also provided direction in what to study effectively. Completing a degree shows you can make a decision effecting three years of your life and have the determination to stick with it.
If you are not (planning on) doing a degree, look for an employer who will give you that experience and framework to learn and apply. My learning has never stopped.
My degree was undersigned by the British Computer Society and as such, we learnt a lot about successful software engineering. For me, though it was not easy, it was the best course for me. I use principles I learned in my degree every day.
The degree will help you get an interview, it will not necessarily get you a job.
Back to the career
For one of my recent jobs, I sent over access to some of my programmes. I am passionate about using computers to help people succeed in the work lives and the role was pretty much asking for coding experience.
I wrote a brief on each one and let the CV reviewers make a decision. I got the interview despite not having recent programming experience because they could see I care about my output.
If you are coding and looking for that first job, there is nothing wrong with doing this. Many roles are being “assessed” to test you can do what you say you can do. You are helping that conversation.
Practice outside of work: for goodness sake, do not just write for your clients. I learnt imagemagick, barcode decoding, OCR, GPS manipulation, voice XML, hadoop, prolog (revisited), python, MS Powershell all for personal use first.
I do a test with my code. I code to sleep late, wake around 2am and try to use my code. If I can use it first time and achieve my goal, I judge it to be good code.
Since 1985, I have never had a call at 2am from a customer who can’t achieve a business critical function as a result 😉
Posted: September 26th, 2015 under 42.