Meet Phil – he joined us back in 2015 as a Compliance Officer. Having devoted his own time and energy to develop skills and gain experience in an area that really interests him, Phil is now on secondment as Lead Power Platform Developer. Here’s his story...
From Compliance to Cloud
I have been at Hastings for six and a half years now, barring a three-month break in Summer 2017. I started as a Compliance Officer in April 2015, moving to roles in Compliance Monitoring and Internal Assurance and Escalations in the ARC team. However, since September, I’ve been on secondment to Cloud Engineering as Lead Power Platform Developer.
Tackling challenges
In my previous roles within ARC, which involved managing audits across the company and managing risk events, I always really enjoyed the aspects where I was able to get hands-on and develop solutions to problems myself. The development which really grabbed my interest is application development on the Microsoft Power Platform; creating apps, automation flows and chat bots. Power Platform is the name given to a series of tools developed by Microsoft, namely PowerApps, PowerBI, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. PowerApps enables low-code development to build solutions to real world business challenges, improving and enhancing the colleague and customer experience. Power Automate is a tool which allows repetitive or complex tasks to be automated and have these automation flows resolve otherwise cumbersome or resource-heavy tasks with ease.
Turning a passion for coding into qualifications
I have always been interested in technical solution development and decided that the time was right for me to take on a new set of challenges and put my passion for ‘coding’ to good use. The first action I took was to get myself a mentor who provided – and continues to provide – honest, clear and actionable recommendations on how to advance my newly-chosen career.
In order to prove myself and show what I was made of in the technical world, I undertook a series of Microsoft learning paths and qualifications through the Employer Skills Initiative which is run by Microsoft. I undertook all of the certifications in relatively quick succession, using my own time and wider study, to ultimately pass the Expert-level Power Platform qualification, PL-600, and become a “Power Platform Solution Architect”.
I was thrilled when the opportunity came up to go on secondment in my new role. My first project is an app which went live in early October for our London office to help these colleagues book desks. Seeing your code in action, and resolving problems as you learn, is what keeps me interested and challenged on a daily basis.
Enjoy it to succeed
The key for me was ensuring that I had a clear aim of what I wanted to achieve and that I really enjoyed doing the training and exams. Learning and development is something that must be self-driven; you have to love what you are learning and know what you want to achieve. I would advise anyone looking for a change of career (even if not as drastic as mine) to think properly about what they really enjoy doing – if you don’t enjoy it, you won’t succeed.
Outside my day job, I am looking to further enhance my knowledge of Azure, as well as expanding my knowledge of the coding languages Python, C# and JavaScript.
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