Thibagar Thiyanamoorthy

Sir George Monoux College, Walthamstow

I studied at Sir George Monoux College for two years, completing two A-Levels, Maths and Statistics, and one BTEC, ICT. At the time, I was aiming for a career path in business, but I was still unsure about it. It was at this time while studying ICT that I began to consider going into a career in IT instead. After finishing my A-Levels, I was set on taking this path and decided to study BSc Business Information Systems.

University of Westminster, London

This course consists of the different aspects of software development, such as requirements gathering and analysis, design and development, testing and maintenance. In my second year, I chose the optional module in web development, which further piqued my interest in IT, especially the development side of it. While I also enjoyed the other stages of a software development life cycle, especially requirements analysis, I was more interested in the development stage and decided I wanted to start my IT career with web development.

Maybrook AM2PM, Whetstone

While studying in university, I decided to work for my uncle in his off-license store in Whetstone, which was about 25 minutes from my home. While working here, I was tasked with manning the till, keeping the store clean and organized, which meant cleaning the shelves, restocking products from the storage room, and making sure no expired products were available to customers. My shifts usually last about 8 hours, by myself, which helped me become more adaptable to different situations that may arise, as well as more independent in the sense that I could tackle different situations by myself.

Aero Lines GmbH

During the month of September, I took a job near Zurich Airport in Aero Lines GmbH, a cargo solutions company that handled overseas import and export, as well as air and ocean freight, transportation, warehouse logistics, etc. While I worked as an administrative assistant, I greatly increased my organization and communication skills when writing up cargo documents and talking to clients about our services. Since it was a Swiss company, I had to use my German, which I already knew from living in Switzerland from birth for 14 years. Although I German faded a little bit due to only speaking English with people for the past few years, I still managed to clearly communicate with clients and fellow employees and to avoid any confusion.

Chingford Service Station, Chingford

While looking for a job in web development, I realized I couldn't just rely on my parents until I find one, so I decided to take a job at a local petrol station. The role is almost identical to my previous role at my uncle's shop, the only major differences being that I also had to handle fuel tanks and making sure that they work and customers don't drive off after filling up without paying.

Just IT Recruitment Group

During the summer of 2017, I came across Just IT, a training and recruitments company. I decided to attend the Developers Programme because, during my job search, I realized that employers needed candidates with commercial experience, and the only experience I had in web development was from university, which wasn't enough, and I also needed to expand my skill set in web development for a better chance at getting a job in the web development sector.

Kession Capital Ltd

During a Just IT internship, I redesigned the home site, https://www.kession.com/, for Kession Capital Ltd, a financial services company. At first, I fully hand coded the site, making use of Bootstrap to make the structure and layout easier to customise. However, I later found out that the site must be hosted using WordPress, a popular content management system (CMS). This turned out to be more challenging than I expected since I had no prior knowledge of WordPress, but after reading the documentation and several other resources, I learned how to use PHP within WordPress and create a custom theme, in order to deploy the site exactly the way I initially developed it.