Skip to main content

Career influences

This isn't necessary a QA centric post, but I felt that it's something that has affected me and I feel like I should say.

We all have career influences in life, people who we meet throughout our career who have a profound affect on the actual career path that we take. 

I am soon going to say goodbye (in that she left the company) to one of these people, she was someone who would always push me to do my best, and is partly the reason why you are reading this blog. She pushed me to get into blogging (along with others, and you can read her blog here), but she's had a major impact on my career and as such my family.

She's someone who really pushed upper management to recognise my talents, and helped them come up with a 6 month career development plan that I hope will get me to where I want to be. I owe her so much gratitude, and I don't think she realises just how much everything she has done for me actually means. (And to think she's not even a tester!) 

I will miss her an awful lot, and my company will miss her too, but there comes a time in everyones life when they have to move on. Hopefully our paths will cross again!

I hope one day I can have a similar effect on some people, but right now I'm eternally grateful for all that she has done for me, and I am sure that we will remain friends.

There have been other people who have had major influences on my career another person was someone who I met at a Hedge Fund, when I hadn't been in testing for long, but he made me realise that I could do so much with my skills, and made me realise that I am better than a lot of other testers out there. He made me believe in myself, and helped me on a personal level too with regards to buying my first house.

Let's not forget, another major influence and someone who will always be a major influence, my wife (I'd have got told off otherwise!)! Who has given me great support and given me the drive to be the best I can on a personal and professional level to provide for my family.

So, who's been your major influence on your career so far (like me it doesn't have to be a QA professional)? How do you think you've influenced peoples career for the better?
Labels:

Comments

  1. Srinivas Kadiyala28 June 2013 at 06:21

    Thanks for sharing wonderful post..It reminded my first company and my team including my managers and VP - They gave me the support to grew up in my professional and personal career.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gareth Waterhouse15 July 2013 at 03:43

      No problem, hopefully you will find more career influences as your career grows in QA. :)

      Delete
  2. Amar G Deogirikar2 July 2013 at 05:37

    Gareth, you are very lucky to have someone like that. Yes, I have my wife and parents to support me in my personal life but none in professional life yet. I am very jealous about this, but I guess it mostly got to do with hard work.

    All the best for your future!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown16 January 2018 at 13:59

    We need more such articles that we can read with such enthusiasm.
    resumeyard.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testers: Be more like a Super-Villain!

Who doesn't love a Super Hero? Talk to my son, and he'll tell you how much he loves them, talk to many adults and they'll say the same! Deep down, we all love to be the Super Hero, we all want to save the day! However, I want to talk about the flip side of Super Heroes, the Super Villains... I often play Imaginext with my son, and I (unfortunately?) am nearly always the Super Villain! Be it Lex Luthor, Joker, Two Face, Mr Freeze or The Riddler! These are all great characters and great Super Villains, but why would I want to write about Super Villains? A while ago where I worked, we had a few Super Heroes, people who would be able to come in and "fix" things that had broken and help deliver projects on time. We then shifted, we decided to do away with the Super Hero culture and try and prevent from being in that position in the first place, whilst we didn't go as far as wanting to hire Super Villains, it's definitely a story that has stuck with me and t...
2 comments
Read more

Tech Develops - A day dedicated to YOU!

Working in Tech, it can be difficult to find the time to further improve yourself, you're focused a lot on delivery, and it can be hard to drag yourself away from it and spend time on delivering an improved you. This is why some companies are starting to have time dedicated to your personal development, where people drop tools and do a personal project or watch some tutorials. Luckily working at ASOS we get the last Friday of every month to focus on this! Last Friday we held what we call a "Tech Develops" day, where as an employee of ASOS and working in Technology, In the week running up to it we decided it would be a good idea to have a platform where people could stand up and perform a 99 Second Talk about anything they please. We had 12 people sign up to it, and we had talks ranging from the technical (Git-Bisect) to a Conference review (UKStar). The first talk was an informative talk about Git Bisect and how it's used and why because of it, it's import...
3 comments
Read more

Treating Test Code as Production Code

It's important when writing automated tests to remember that the code you write should be up to production standards, meaning any conventions that you have in place should be adhered to and that it should follow good design patterns. Too many people often say why does it have to be as good as production code, it's "Only" a test, so long as it passes then that's fine... To answer this we need to look at why we want our tests to be written in such a structured and efficient manner: - Maintainability - by making the test code structured and efficient, it becomes far easier to maintain and in doing so changes in the future can happen quickly as the test isn't linked to anything that it shouldn't be and it's easy to understand for a new set of eyes. - Durability - Again by making the tests structured they should be resistant to changes, if you change a variable name for instance then it shouldn't effect the unit test unless it absolutely has to....
1 comment
Read more