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Not everybody's a techie in technology

 

From telephone banking, to human resources, to cloud computing. Rubinder’s had a zigzag career with a wide variety of roles at the Group, and that’s the way she likes it.

Rubinder in the office on a video call on her laptop, smiling in conversation.

After a varied career in the Group, Rubinder is now a Cloud Services Engineer. 

I actually studied IT at A level and scored really well, but for me, it was always quite a mathematical area and I always saw maths as a weakness of mine. Instead, I did an International Business and Management degree and a Masters in Human Resources. The thing is, to really develop your career, I’ve always thought you should tackle your weaknesses head on.

“The thing is, to really develop your career, I’ve always thought you should tackle your weaknesses head on.”

So when I came out of my Masters, I joined Lloyds Banking Group as a Credit Risk Analyst, which has a strong mathematical element. I moved around, with roles in telephone banking and HR, eventually arriving in Group Talent. Here I was looking at ways to move talent and reskill colleagues into future areas of the business, such as Software Engineering. I'd always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to get into technology, so I applied for an IT apprenticeship myself.

Gaining experience

My journey has been incredibly rich with a variety of experiences. I've gained various qualifications, the most recent being a distinction L4 software developer apprenticeship. I’ve gained valuable insight into five different teams, from Agile Software Engineering to DevOps.

Now I'm in the Cloud native team, specifically looking into API services. I’m fascinated by Cloud engineering and this is a learning environment where I work solely on developing the skills I need for a new career journey. I'm enjoying being exposed to the cloud computing architecture within this role and helping many platforms migrate onto the cloud, because APIs are key to integrate new applications with existing software systems in the cloud environment. 

All the teams I've joined have been really accommodating. There’s a strong collaborative nature. I thought everyone was going to have all this lingo that I wouldn’t understand, but not everybody's a techie in technology. 

“People think of a career as quite linear, where you always get promoted, whereas I see it as more of a zigzag.”

Learning and development

The apprenticeship works towards a British Computer Society qualification. You have a mentor and 20% of your time is allocated to upskilling and learning. My mentor was a Front-End Engineer. I learned the basics in terms of a website structure of HTML, how to style that using CSS, add more functionality using JavaScript and refactoring it using frameworks like React.

I also learned SQL and Java and received a diploma in Software Development Methodologies. It was a well-structured way of learning. There's a lot of self-learning, but I had great resources, such as Pluralsight and LinkedIn learning. And the buddy system was really useful. 

The Group is such a big organisation that if I don't enjoy something, I can speak to a network of mentors, or my manager, and they'll find somebody for me to shadow in a different area. I think those opportunities are quite unique to Lloyds Banking Group. That's what keeps me interested. 

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