Career Relaunch®
Joseph Liu
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Finding What Fits You with Aimi Elias
How much should a company’s culture factor into your decision to work there? A lot it turns out. Civil engineer turned software developer Aimi Elias explains the importance of feeling like you fit into your workplace and the role culture plays in your day-to-day job satisfaction. Afterwards, I’ll share my own thoughts on how culture has had an impact on me during my own professional pivots. Aimi’s actually a long-time listener of this show, and we first connected when she dropped me a note last year mentioning how Career Relaunch podcast episode 8 (featuring Zai Divecha) got her thinking about her own moments of flow, including those moments when she lost track of time as a teenager tinkering around with code. Now, many years later, she’s tapped back into her own flow state working on software development and machine learning at Sky. Key Career Takeaways Although a job can sound “cool” and interesting on paper, it doesn’t mean the day-to-day realities of that work will necessarily be interesting to you. The cultural influences of your company can have a huge impact on your day-to-day satisfaction and comfort in a job. While securing a sought-after certification or credential in your field may seem like a way of dealing with job dissatisfaction, it only goes so far if you’re still fundamentally misplaced in the wrong sector. Tweetables to Share I didn't realise how much of my identity was tied to my career until I changed careers. Aimi Elias Tweet This Resources Interested in shifting into a tech career? Learn more about Sky’s Get into Tech programme that Aimi mentioned. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of considering whether your current job is moving you closer to or farther from the type of person you want to be in your life and career. Do you like the person you’re becoming? Or do you feel more like you’re having to put on an act to fit into your role or organisation by being someone you’re not? If you feel like your work is turning you into someone you don’t like, aside from actually leaving that job behind, consider what change you could make to your way of working, your mindset about work, or your attitude toward your job that could enable you to live your life in a way that makes you proud, or at the very least, you won’t eventually regret in the long run. About Aimi Elias Aimi Elias is a software developer at Sky, part of the Comcast Corporation, and one of Europe’s leading media and entertainment companies. Prior to this, she spent six years working as a civil engineer after graduating from Imperial College, when she worked for Transport For London, the government body responsible for most of the transport network in London, England. She worked on railway projects such as the Crossrail and station upgrades for the London Underground. Then, in 2017, she joined the Get Into Tech programme, a 14 week introduction to software development run by Sky alongside her full time job. This eventually led acceptance into a graduate programme at Sky, where she is a now a backend Python developer for Sky’s e-commerce platform for their online streaming service. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Aimi know! Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Follow: Be sure to follow Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android to automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners! Leave Joseph a Voicemail You can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting the Career Relaunch® podcast A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership. Interview Segment Music Credits Arden Forest – Slow Moves Two Rivers – Ciaran Delany Paintings – Ookean Presence – Ambientalism Trellis – Podington Bear Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I’ve been a minority all my life in wherever I go. I’m kind of used to it. The difference is when it’s affecting directly how people perceive you in a career sense, all of a sudden, it feels very loud. Aimi: [02:37] Thanks for having me. Joseph: I want to talk about a lot of different things with you today. We’re going to talk about your career in civil engineering, and then also your shift to coding in a completely different industry. I was wondering if you could start off by first of all just telling me what’s been keeping you occupied in your life, both work and also personal lately. Aimi: [02:56] I currently work for Sky as a back-end developer. I work on the e-commerce platform for their online streaming service. We deal with the catalog of products and offers that customers can purchase from wherever they are in different territories. For example, in the UK Island and some European countries, provide content for Sky, and in the US, we provide content by NBCU, that’s NBC Universal. In my spare time, particularly the last two years, I’ve been working on my MSC, part-time. This is an MSC in Computer Science, as I don’t have a background in computer science. I decided to do this to upskill myself. I didn’t know at the time that we would be in the midst of all of this craziness, but it helped that I could spend more time on it at home. I’ve just finished that, and I’m glad that section of life is over and I don’t have to sit any more academic exams. That’s what I’ve been working on mostly. Joseph: Can you also just tell me a little bit about your background? Aimi: [04:08] My family are from Malaysia. They came to London I think in 1982. My parents met here as young people like on a course, and they ended up staying here. Myself and my brother were both born in London. Joseph: Let’s just go back in time a little bit. Because you haven’t always been a software developer. Could you tell me a little bit about your 6-year career in civil engineering, which is what you were doing before? And then, we could move forward from there. Aimi: [04:37] I graduated in civil engineering at Imperial. It’s the kind of degree where you immediately have a lot of opportunities in terms of jobs. The natural progression seemed to be get a job in civil engineering. I had spent every summer working in a design consultancy, so it didn’t seem like a bad idea considering I had some work experience to try that. However, when I graduated, it was 2010, and jobs was becoming quite scarce. We had the recession at that time. Nothing like what people are experiencing right now I’m sure, but it was still one of those times where it was quite difficult. When I did manage to get a job at Transport for London, I obviously took it because you couldn’t exactly complain. Joseph: Transport for London is a TFL, I guess. It’s the largest government provider of transportation services in the country. Aimi: [05:39] That’s right. Transport for London, look after London Underground, the buses, the cycle hire scheme and the cycle superhighways, for example. A lot of roads in London, they cover a lot of bases. I was positioned in London Underground, the London Underground graduate scheme, which was a 3-year graduate scheme. I met people of my own age who had also left university. Having done civil engineering, it was a scheme where I managed to do lots of different things and it was really interesting. I worked on Crossrail, which is a brand new railway line that transports people from east to west London. On London Underground, station upgrades, and I could have talked all day about how cool it was. People thought my job was really cool, but the day-to-day reality of it wasn’t that interesting to me. I just sort of went with it. All the signs were saying, “Oh, you’re doing really well.” People will tell me, “You’re doing really well. Just keep going. It’s fine.” My parents would say, “Oh, you’re doing so…”. You just get all these positive signals that everything’s fine, so you just keep going. The natural route in engineering is to also get charted. Civil engineers get charted with the Institution of Civil Engineers. I did a lot of work with them you know work towards this professional qualification. When I achieved that qualification, nothing was different. I expected I don’t know work to suddenly become more interesting or stuff to be more challenging, but it didn’t happen. Joseph: Is that certification a barrier to entry for more senior roles, or is it like a stamp of approval? Aimi: [07:31] It’s a bit of both. I think for some roles, it can be a barrier to entry. It doesn’t mean that people don’t progress without it. Many experienced engineers do not have this qualification. Sometimes, they take a different route to get there. But there can be jobs that require it as part of their job spec. Joseph: Okay. You’re working on the Crossrail which was probably, in recent years, has been the most major, publicly impactful project to create, that high-speed rail network to connect people outside of London into London. More convenient station
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