My introduction to Version 1

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So it’s the Friday of my second week at Version 1, I started just after the festive celebrations as a “Senior Azure Platform Consultant” very fancy, I still think im that inexperienced student coming into the industry as innocent as ever.

This year marks ten years in the “Tech” industry, or IT if you want to call it that. Its something this week I’ve spoken about to current students at the college I went to fifteen years prior.

So I started at Version 1 last Monday, I previously worked at a great consultancy Shaping Cloud, which to be honest was a hard decision for myself to leave as I was in a good position in the organisation, and worked with some really great people. But you know what? In these situations, you need to think about player one, and your own career and future aspirations.

So here I am, I started at Version 1, who are in all a much larger organisation than any of the previous roles I have, with over 3000 staff, so I knew it would be a major change. Imposter syndrome is still a thing by the way, I have at every role felt like I was never going to be good enough, and nothing changed here, but you know what, you have to back yourself as well.

I started last week with getting my Version 1 credentials and onboarding my laptop into the organisation, decent spec for a small notebook with an i7 and 32GB memory.

Once I was settled in and got my desk set up, I had a few introduction calls with the rest of the Azure Practice in which I would be working in. This practice is prioritising End User compute, such as Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365 & Intune, which is great as that is my background.

The rest of the week was a mix between onboarding calls, mandatory training and some client work, Id say it was being thrown in the deep end but it was nothing I hadn’t done before, even though it was on a different cloud (AWS).

One thing working for a large organisation like Version 1, I knew there would be a lot of mandatory training, but that is great at the same time, it is somewhat nice to have some form of structure whilst working for a tech company.

Last week finished, and to be honest I was shattered. But I had managed to bed myself into the role, meet the rest of my team, and get some hands on with some tech.

I have worked at numerous organisations now in my tenure, and I have found 90% of the learning when joining a new org, is the ways of working. How do people deal with client requests? how do we scope work? how do we handle timesheets? All of this I have done before, but not in the same way as I do now.

St Helens College talk

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Fast forward to this week, I did some more onboarding for some future client work, and then I had a day at my local college to do a talk.

So this was the second time I have done a talk like this at St Helens College, which started last year. This year Version 1 allowed me to take a day to do the talks, which was great from them with me only just starting.

My talk began at the college I attended over fifteen years ago to the current IT students doing the same course I did. I focused on my career to date and more specifically on how students could start a career in 2025. I spoke a lot about soft skills, the speaking, picking up the phone skills and how to write documentation. Tech skills can be taught and learnt; those soft skills come with practice. There are loads of free material out there now for students, I really appreciate the GitHub student developer pack for example, which provides some real-world courses (such as how to write Markdown) and some free certifications in GitHub and Microsoft.

But yeah, It was nice to do another talk in St Helens College, a few students stayed behind to ask questions and a few asked how a day looked like in my shoes, I didn’t bear to say stuck in Teams calls!

The rest of the week again was some more mandatory training and onboarding which took the best part of two days, but I am glad it’s now done.

So have I enjoyed my first few weeks? I’d say so! It has been a massive change to be honest, and one that I really took a while over. But it’s nice to see a different perspective of the technology industry, and seeing tools like SharePoint, Viva and others being actively used.

Starting a new role is always quite nerve wracking, are you going to like your new colleagues? Are you going to get on well with clients? What if you don’t understand some of the tools? But this has re-energised my passion for technology, something which I lost at the backend of 2024.

I am looking forward to doing some more work with HashiCorp Packer and Ansible, all which aid in creating a modern Azure Virtual Desktop environment.

And this is my first post using Medium! I do have my own website which I use to blog, but I see Version 1 have some posts on here and I thought I would give it a go, and it’s been great! Until next time…

Jamie