Um So good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Correa's meet and greet and my name is Stephanie. I'm a managing consultant with Crea and I've been with the company for just over four years and I'm really thrilled to be hosting this session today.And I also have Zane joining me, Zane is an engineer with Crea and she'll be helping facilitate the session, I think by keeping an eye on the chat. And so please post any questions that you may have for us in there um as the name of the session suggests, and today I'm going to introduce you to Crea, a really great company to work for. So I hope I do justice. And as well as that, I'm going to talk to you about my career journey with Crea and the lead up to that. And what I really want to demonstrate today is just how varied a career in technology and technology consulting can be and even within the same company. So who are we? Um Crea is a global boutique consulting firm with offices in the UK, the US India, Mauritius and Australia. Um We have four offices in the UK. We have one in London, Leeds, Manchester, and our newest office opened recently in Newcastle. And we've a offices in the US and we've recently opened an office just this year in Sydney. And so what does a global boutique consultancy actually mean?

Well, it means that our clients have access to a global wealth of expertise with the personalized approach expected from a local partner. We help our clients across five main areas, um strategy, transformation, cloud engineering and data, and the best projects often actually encompass multiple if not all of these areas. Um So for example, at the moment, I am working on a project helping one of our public sector clients to build a data mesh and my day to day will span cloud data and engineering. Um However, we also have people on the team whose role it is to actually transform the organization to ensure the successful adoption of what we're actually building. So I've already mentioned that I'm working in the public sector. Um But our people have experience working across many different sectors including energy and financial services. And here's just a selection of the clients that we're currently working with or who we've worked with in the past. And I hope that these kind of first few slides have started to build a picture of the variety which comes with a career in consulting.

So as well as making an extraordinary impact on our clients, it is part of our mission to make that same impact on our people and our community. And at the heart of this lie, our five core values, um our five core values are humility. And so we consider our clients and our colleagues interests as more important than our own. And when we are wrong, we learn from our mistakes and work to rebuild trust and confidence and excellence. We don't try sell the perfect solution. Instead, we take time to really understand the issues and apply our experience to achieve remarkable results, integrity. We do the right thing even when no one is watching and no matter the cost tenacity, we are focused on driving a project from strategy to successful completion.

And last but not least people first, we treat each person with value and care. We know that individual differences bring strength. I know that every company has something like this. Um But I guess one of kind of the things that sticks with me and how we kind of embody these these values is that we are, I guess a more practical example is that we are completely vendor agnostic. We don't try and push specific products on to our clients. We make sure that we find the right solution for their requirements and their needs. So our people really are at the center of what we do and we're immensely proud of the awards that we have received, which reflect this and something that's very important, but actually isn't highlighted on this slide is that this year, we were also acknowledged by the Women in It Awards as Outstanding Diversity Network of the year 2022.

Another way in which we place a strong emphasis on our people is through the networks of support which we have. Um And these are really opportunities for people to bring their interests to work. Um So just to call out a few of these um credit climate aims to raise environmental awareness and reduce the company's environmental footprint. And we recently organized a company Wide Green Week and had a lunch and learn about ongoing rewilding efforts. Our diversity equity, an inclusion team includes groups that focus on gender, LGBT Q plus minority ethnicities and visible and invisible disabilities. And we also have numerous self managed clubs where we can get together and share our interests such as running gaming and film.

So what is it really like working for crea? Um So my aim here is not to give you a sales pitch on why Crea is the best. Um But actually instead show you a few of the different paths that are available to you when you choose a career in technology and technology consulting. Um and also just share some practical steps that I took to change the direction of my career whilst working with Crea. So I have been working in technology consulting for the last eight years and I've been with C era for four of those years and while my title is managing consultant, my role is kind of much more aligned to our engineering practice. Um I think all of all of the boundaries of our roles are quite blurred, but I think, yeah, my experience helps me bring quite a good balance of that technical knowledge and people skills to the role. Um So currently I'm tech lead for a program building a data mesh, as I mentioned. Um And at the moment, I'm responsible for kind of the quality of the engineering delivery across the program and oversee a team with kind of 1520 engineers. Um While I am predominantly Aws focused, um I have been fortunate enough to work on a variety of different cloud projects um where I've also gained practical experience in Azure and GCP, I'm also very interested in DEV OPS and C I CD.

And I've used a variety of different tooling for automation, including github and GIT lab. And then finally, um the mandatory fun fact that must be included um having done very little um during the various lockdowns, I recently took up rowing and raced in my first regatta just a few weeks ago. So there have been a few key moments or turning points in my career and joining Cordera was definitely one of those. Um But for those of you in the session who are maybe at an earlier stage in your career, perhaps you don't have much consulting or technology experience yet. Um I'll go back a little bit further. So I studied biomedical engineering at University in Dublin and to give you a sense of just how green I was when I entered the world of tech. Um my thesis and the last couple of years at university, I focused on looking at bone cement and the ways in which it can be delivered into bone to improve fixation of artificial joints when you get kind of a hip or knee replacement, for example.

Um So when I left university, I had never even heard of the Cloud, I had no idea what devops was or Python or no idea. Um so equipped with my degree in biomedical engineering, then I made the less obvious choice of applying for a role as a graduate financial software engineer with a small start up in London. So during this role, I actually spent most of my time working with just two other graduate engineers. Um And I was studying and learning all about something called K DB plus, which is a Time series database and it has its own language cue. And this was actually a really tough environment to work in. Um And kind of within six months, I realized that it really was not the path for me and I sort of cut my losses. Um But I had heard about this company called Accenture and a few of my engineering classmates had joined after graduating. So I decided, yeah, maybe this is quite a good middle ground for me. And so after attending one of their networking events, I applied to their technology consulting graduate program and started a short while later, it's safe to say at this stage that I definitely fell into my career in technology consulting. As I think many consultants probably do.

Um quite a lot of my projects then over the next four years were networks based with a particular focus on something called DNS and IP address management. And once again, I was completely new to the tech I was working with. Um during this time though I learned a huge amount about these technologies and also networking and connectivity fundamentals. Um I think something which I didn't quite appreciate though at the time or maybe it just wasn't as obvious to me was some of the other skills that I gained.

So I got a really good grounding in project management, how to plan a large migration of life systems, working with a range of technical and business stakeholders and also working with technical teams and it was actually this last part. So working with technical teams, which was the most enjoyable part of my role and getting the opportunity to actually understand the detail of what they were implementing. And this was one of the kind of key influencing factors for my move to crea. So I had heard about CREA through linkedin. And when I started doing my research, there were a few things that really resonated with me. Um First up was just how much they valued their people. Um And I was acutely kind of aware of, you know, the best places to work awards that they had won even way back then. Um Secondly, it was clear that they built really strong relationships with their clients. Um There was a very strong sense of working in partnership with clients and being trusted advisors. And then finally, kind of based on my previous few roles, I knew that being a consultant with that deep technical expertise was what I really wanted and what was very important to me.

Um And I could really see this in a number of their consultants that I spoke to whilst kind of going through the interview process. And also I attended a couple of networking events as well. So my first couple of roles with Crea continued to be quite project management coordinator type roles and to give you just a better idea of what some of these entailed. Um So my first project with Cordera was actually as a testing coordinator for an airport group in the UK. And I supported the creation of a test strategy and a test plan for the roll out of a new network at one of their airports. And then one of my longest running roles was actually as a migration manager on NHS Digital's health and social care network migration. And we worked with NHS Digital to migrate over 14,000 W A services and save the NHS millions of pounds a year. Um So I actually kind of on a day to day basis. Then I worked with groups of GPS and hospitals right across London and two of their new network suppliers to help them through the procurement and the roll out of their new network. What I realized though, through these roles as good as they were was that I really missed working closely with the technology and the technical teams.

And over time, I kind of became a little bit conscious that I hadn't really found that one area of tech that I wanted to specialize in and rightly or wrongly then began to doubt my ability as a consultant. So that was the point then that I really leaned on my colleagues and the support that crede offers to make a positive change, which has since led to some great roles and projects. And the dominant factor was that I knew I loved problem solving. So the move towards engineering seemed like quite a natural next step. However, it did take me some time to realize that I could absolutely do this with crede, I just needed to kind of speak to the right people and ask for help essentially. Um So I began by focusing my attention on one cloud provider. Um at the time, Aws was pretty dominant in the market and a lot of our projects were Aws based. Um So I started by doing an Aws certification. And then later that year, I actually got to attend the Aws Re Invent conference with three of my colleagues. And this gave me a really great exposure to everything the technology could do. And it also kind of gave me that language that I needed to communicate um kind of with colleagues and clients about it from there. Though I realized that I really needed to get some hands on project experience before I could work on some of our client projects.

And so I started working with a team of other crea consultants and engineers to build out an Aws landing zone for use internally within CREA. And this is also then when I started learning to use infrastructure as code and terra form. Yeah, terraform is probably what a lot of people know it as um I guess having that safe environment to learn the technology and was an absolute game changer for me as well as having lots of people around me who supported my learning and kind of shared their experience from client projects with me.

Um So at that point, I then got my first engineering lead role and although there was a very strong sense of Stockholm syndrome kicking in at that point. And it was the perfect first role though for me and it was quite a short piece of work and it was taking all of the skills that I had learned internally building out an Aws landing zone such as infrastructures, code de C I CD practices and then being able to apply them to Azure.

Um And then, as I mentioned earlier, I'm now the technical lead for a large data mesh implementation. Um We have three teams of engineers who are building out different parts of the architecture and this has been a big step up in terms of complexity. However, I have been able to bring that past infrastructure with uh past experience with infrastructure as code and DEV ops and the likes to this project. Um And I guess, yeah, maybe something to call is that, you know, there's a huge opportunity to make things a reality um and kind of build teams as a safe environment so that people of all levels can really contribute to the organizations that we help. So just to kind of summarize the previous slide then into some of the more practical steps that I took. Um So, like I said, I started off with doing a certification. Um I used some of my crea training budget and dedicated training time to take my Aws solution, Architect Associates certification. Um This gave me a really good grounding and it really helped build my confidence with the technology um as it was pretty non-existent previously, um I took advantage then of cars internal initiatives to get hands on practical experience with the technology I was learning.

Um I also used my training budget to get some career coaching. Um And I was actually, yeah, I was quite apprehensive about this at the start, but it ended up being a really, really practical and just helped me to take the actions that I needed to get moving in the right direction. Um And then finally, crede also have a brilliant scheduling team who always kind of took my aspirational capabilities into account when placing me on projects. And they found me a series of amazing roles which again, really helped build my confidence in this, this new role. Um So that brings me just to say thank you and I guess open things up to Q and A.