I had just renewed my contract with previous company (Accenture) before getting the call for a potential IT Support position at Vanquis Bank. The opportunity ticked a few boxes for me:
During the interview process, there was lots of discussion around growth in the business, IT change and improving services – this sounded like a great place to be!
All aboard. I worked with the Technical Support team in London for about a year when I joined Vanquis. We supported staff in the London office in all aspects of IT. This was a great team, everyone rolled up their sleeves to get the job done.Then, just as I was getting slightly comfortable...
Upgrade. I was seconded for a role in the Infrastructure Support Team for a systems management upgrade project. This meant spending time with the teams in Chatham and learning more about the overall infrastructure at the bank (the network/server infrastructure, security and our business applications). Working with the wider infrastructure teams was a great experience – the dedication and depth of knowledge of my colleagues was incredible.
At around this time, more enterprise companies were changing the way they were delivering IT to the business - taking on the DevOps approach. DevOps (combining IT “development” and “operations”) represents a big transformation – merging cultural change, practices and tools to deliver business applications and outcomes faster, more frequently and with more reliability.
All Change. As part of an IT-wide reorganisation just after the summer of 2018, services have been aligned to work closer to the business and follow the DevOps methodology. I have moved into the Commercial Infrastructure Engineering and the team is assembling as we speak! There are some great new technology and toolsets to adapt, and the overall method to how we work has also changed.
There is a huge focus in the teams on how we ensure our infrastructure and services are more resilient, how we can automate generic tasks, proactively monitor and alert for any issues and ensure consistency amongst our infrastructure environments. Amongst the teams, workshops are held to share knowledge and resources like Pluralsight are available for staff to expand skills.
There is a theme of progression and career development when you look over career stories on the Vanquis website – I certainly feel there are many opportunities and the way that Vanquis responds to change, creates these prospects.