Version 1 Careers: Exploring Career Rotations at Version 1

I graduated from UCC in 2009 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Information Systems. I spent 7 years living and working in London for a US-based ICT solutions provider before returning home to Cork in 2017 where I joined an Irish ICT company. 1 year later in August of 2018, I began my career with Version 1 and I haven’t looked back since!

My current role is Service Delivery Manager at the Version 1 Cork office and I oversee the day to day operations in our practice. My work involves account management, team management, financial management and forecasting as well as ensuring a consistent level of delivery assurance to our clients.

In previous roles, before joining Version 1, I gained many valuable years of experience in account management and project coordination. These roles exposed me to the basics of planning, scheduling and managing projects, coordinating teams and client relationship management. All essential skills but I could never see past the next 12 months and where I could potentially take my career. I felt I was getting caught in cycles of repetitive administrative tasks and my degree was becoming less relevant as the years went on.

Since joining Version 1 in 2018, though, I have been empowered to take on a much more senior role than what I have been accustomed to elsewhere. On a daily basis I’m encouraged to take ownership of my career and I feel like my future has been put back into my own hands. Version 1 as an organisation has been nothing but proactive in terms of promoting continuous learning and development from within.

In my first 2 years at Version 1 there have been numerous new opportunities made available to me that have enabled me to drive my professional development. In this time, I have become a certified ScrumMaster, earned an ITIL certificate in IT service management and I have just completed a year at UCC where I studied for a certificate in Management Practice. I undertook the latter on evenings and weekends and not only was it funded by Version 1, but it was also actively encouraged and supported by the company. I have found this investment in me – both personally and professionally – to be empowering and on a daily basis I have been afforded the opportunity to put these new learnings into practice in a challenging but supportive environment.

In my experience, it is this trusting environment that is the marked difference from previous roles I have held. There is a notable company-wide mentality and culture of open-mindedness, mutual respect, and inclusivity. All stemming from the 6 core values which are genuinely followed from new starters all the way up to senior management. In 2006, Drucker said “Organisations are no longer built on force but on trust” and after a 9^th consecutive year of Version 1 being listed as a Great Place to Work in Ireland, I can see that this holds true.

As I enter my third year with the company, it pleases me to say that I have much more visible career path now and my aim is to one day become a Portfolio Director in Version 1 where I will have a wide-ranging responsibility for customer engagement and service delivery in our sector. Thanks to the performance management ethos that form my quarterly appraisals with my manager, these regular 2-way conversations have continued to deliver feedback helping to motivate and improve my vision and performance as well as reinforcing and aligning my goals as an individual with those of Version 1.

I read in a 2006 Forbes article, “Performance is what you do, and potential is what you could do”. My experience shows that Version 1 never allows the paradox of performance and potential to be compromised on either side. It’s this happy balance that allows me to get out what I put in and my advice to anyone seeking a new career in Version 1 is to remember this and that your career becomes what you make of it.

I am from Tipperary and went to college in NUI Galway where I studied Business Information Systems. From there I worked in KPMG on a contract in Management Consulting, before starting in Version 1 in the graduate programme. I started in the ERP Ireland Team as a Functional Consultant. My role involved supporting our customers who use Oracle E-Business Suite for their financials and supply chain operations. Most of this work was done remotely but there were onsite activities such as month-end support or for projects that come up.

I’ve moved twice in Version 1 – I first moved into an Accounts Receivable role on secondment to the Finance Team, and then into a full-time Business Analyst role in our Digital and Cloud Solutions department. The move to the Accounts Receivable team came about during the first COVID-19 lockdown and I was asked to help the AR Team out. Then the more customer-facing Business Analyst role became available to work with a household name in the banking sector here in Ireland, and I was selected for this position.

I believe my career has progressed well since changing roles. I am getting experience with a new customer and industry. I am working side by side with customers now more than before too. Since moving into this role I have improved my business analyst skills such as working with stakeholders, business process mapping, and writing user stories. In my role, we use Agile Scrum methodologies and I have taken the Professional Scrum Master training to expand my knowledge in that area. I have gained project management skills and obtained the PRINCE2 Foundation level certification. I’ve no regrets on my moves, everything has been a new experience and I have enjoyed learning in all the roles I have been in.

In terms of another rotation, I don’t see myself pivoting again for a while. I can see a clear path of learning for myself where I want to build on my project management certifications and maybe get some more experience in that. I have started learning the Microsoft Power Platform which I believe is a great tool to have and they are my next target to get certified in.

My advice to those considering a rotation would be: embrace the change! It’s all about building experience.

I have a computer science degree and spent almost 10 years at IBM as an IT Consultant working for multiple customers across Europe as a developer, designer and architect. I then moved across to training and development and gradually evolved into a full-time HR professional at a number of financial services companies. I joined Version 1 in 2014 as the first HR person to join the UK team when we were about 100 people in the UK. I helped to grow the UK team and integrate several new acquisitions we made during that time. This role really enhanced my change management, project management and people management skills and experience. I’ve moved several times since then! Firstly I moved into Sales Operations to help the Chief Commercial Officer to grow the team and enhance our sales and business development processes. Then I spent a period as a Sales Director, before returning to HR to head up the function for a year. Subsequently, I’ve moved into a newly created role as Director of Strategy, Planning and Communications, working directly for the CEO. I’ve always been motivated by interesting work and new challenges – all of which these moves afforded me.

The rotation process was pretty smooth and always involved lots of conversations with my managers involved in the moves to make sure disruption was minimised: be that by finding the right people to backfill the roles I was leaving, or by having interim periods where I was covering elements of both roles. My career has involved constantly learning new skills, gaining new experience and taking on new challenges. In my experience, as you get better as these things, progression naturally follows as you gain a broad and desirable set of transferable skills, and that has certainly been the case for me. I have no regrets about changing roles. I fully expect that I’ll pivot again at some point: but for now, I definitely have enough challenge, stretch and opportunity in my role not to need to do that. When I do want to pivot again, I expect to be able to do that at Version 1 because of the breadth and scale of what we do.

My advice to anyone considering a rotation would be: take some risks: I’ve never been 100% sure about any change I’ve made and I’m not sure anyone ever is. But if you don’t take some chances, it’s harder to grow and challenge yourself.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in systems analysis and project management courses. Since the beginning of my career, I have been working with languages based on Microsoft architecture, starting with Visual Fox Pro to the present day, using .NETcore. I also hold certifications of development in .NET(MCP), SCRUM(CSM) and management (ITIL).

My career in  Version 1 started in customer support. My role involved me keeping several projects running, fixing bugs and creating new features according to the needs of the clients. After a year of working there, I was offered the opportunity to be a technical leader on 2 projects. The proposal was very interesting to me because it allowed me to continue in the area of ​​development and also to act as leader of the team, which was where I wanted my career progression.

The internal rotation process was very simple because I only changed the function in the area where I already worked. Since joining Version 1, I have been able to change levels internally twice, each level has enabled me to focus on new types of challenges, which allowed me to continue learning and developing by experimenting with new ways of working.

Due to the pandemic, in 2020 I was forced to change clients. In this new project, I have the opportunity to review several languages ​​that I haven’t used in some time and also to learn new technologies, such as Angular 11 that we are using to create new applications.

My focus is currently on improving my management skills and learning as many new languages ​​as possible so that I can prepare myself for my next level within the company.

I am RedHat, Linux and AWS certified and have worked in the IT industry since around 1997. During my career, I have worked for some major IT players such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard in both support and consulting roles. I was originally employed as the senior Linux admin, and then also moved into Oracle administration. This involved not only Oracle and Linux but also networking, storage administration, email servers, DNS servers, HTTP servers and much more.

For my rotation at Version 1, I moved into a Digital and Cloud DevOps Engineer role, currently focused on AWS and its associated services. I had been doing AWS training to become certified, and I was amazed at what was possible with AWS and decided I would like to get into it. I moved into my new role in January 2020, and on a personal level, my career has advanced exponentially. I am constantly learning and implementing new technologies and loving every minute of it. My hope is to advance a CPD level next year and take on more responsibility. The process of rotating was very straight forward too, which helped.

The core skills I have learned are the AWS suite of tools, and the software we use as DevOps engineers to enable us to provide a more efficient service to the client, this includes tools such as Packer, Vault, Python, Terraform, and others. Leveraging the best of AWS along with the best of the open-source tools available to us enables us to give the client the best they can get. My goals now are to continue to grow with my new role, get more qualifications and experience and help the team to grow as much as possible.

My advice to anyone looking for a rotation is to help yourself as much as you can before applying for the new role. Is there a qualification specific to the new role that you could get? If so, get it. This will show that you not only have a role-specific qualification but also you are keen and on the ball. Study as much as you can about the role beforehand and learn as many of the tools the role will require as you can.

I studied Business Information Systems in NUI Galway for 4 years before starting my career with Version 1 in 2016. After 1 year in the company, I left to go on an early Career Break to move to Austin, Texas on a Graduate Visa, where I worked in a Risk and Operations position with a well-known Social Media company. I resumed my role with Version 1 in January 2019 where I worked on the ERP Managed services team in Dublin and provided Oracle Financials E-Business Suite support for a number of customers.

The role I rotated to is Business Analyst on a project for a household name in the banking sector in Ireland. I have always had an interest in becoming a Business Analyst as it is a role I thought I would be suited to. Also, I felt that it was a role where I would be able to enhance my skill set at an early stage in my career by working on different projects, in customer-facing environments and potentially with several different customers, in different industries. So, when I got asked to rotate into the role of a Business Analyst, I was more than happy to take it and very motivated to succeed in it.

I was lucky that an opportunity came up and a position needed to be filled as soon as possible so the rotation process for me all happened within the space of two weeks. It was a very efficient process where both my old team and HR were really helpful in making it happen. Although I am only 6 months into my new role, I definitely feel like I am now on the right track in terms of where I would like my career to go. I have had a lot of exposure over the last couple of months, working on a fast-paced project where there is a lot of change going on every day. This is both exciting and challenging but the main thing for me is that I am definitely progressing. The new role has enabled me to learn a lot about becoming a Business Analyst, to learn about the customer and also about the industry.

In my role, I am required to gain a good understanding of the systems and technologies that the bank use so I can work with stakeholders to identify where automation could be applied to make processes more efficient. Once this is identified, I then work with the customer to see this change through a full lifecycle, from an idea to a delivered solution.

So not only have I learned about these systems and technologies that are specific to the bank, but I have also learned new skills and used my existing skill set to help make these changes happen for the customer. Some examples of the skills required in this role that I have both learned and enhanced, including facilitating workshops, communicating effectively, problem-solving, presenting to large audiences, business process mapping, and producing high-quality user stories and wireframes, all while working in an Agile Scrum environment. Additionally, I have acquired two certifications – Professional Scrum Master and the Prince 2 Foundation.

I would have three pieces of advice for anyone considering a rotation. Firstly, make it known that you are thinking about a rotation. Let your line manager and colleagues know as they would then be able to put you forward for a role that comes up or they could put you in contact with someone that may be able to help. Secondly, reach out to a colleague who is in the role that you are hoping to rotate into. It may not be what you thought it was or what you were expecting so I would definitely recommend having a conversation with someone who has experience in your desired role. Lastly, if an opportunity comes about and you are interested in it, then go for it as even if it doesn’t go according to plan, you will still have learned something in the new role that will add to your experience and boost your knowledge or skillset.

I have 5 years experience in IT working with finance and utilities companies and am educated in engineering, law and finance. I started out as a senior VBA Developer for a major client project at Version 1, mainly focused on supporting existing VBA tools, building advanced reporting systems and overseeing migration tools. I rotated to a Cloud Consultant position on a Cloud and Automation project, and, later, became an Oracle Application Consultant on a Cloud ERP project. I was inspired to rotate as VBA was a declining technology and I wanted to move into a growing tech area.

For me, the rotation process was very quick and took about two months. I had been preparing for nearly a year prior to this by completing a cloud certification. My career has become a lot more fluid since I changed roles. I use a mix of technologies daily like AWS, Azure, OCI, GCP, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Kubernetes, Docker, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins. I now have experience across multiple areas which means it’s easy for me to fit in on nearly any project. As a result, my career options are now a lot wider than before.