How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Tech Careers | Workplus Ep. 9

How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Tech Careers

In this inspiring episode of Workplus, host Richard Kirk speaks with Mia, a software tester and apprentice with Teamwork. From full-time mum to tech professional, Mia shares her journey into the software industry, offering hope and insight to anyone considering a return to work or a career pivot. This conversation is filled with practical advice, real-life wins, and powerful reminders that good work is possible, even while juggling school runs and software bugs.

Key Takeaways
• Apprenticeships make tech careers more accessible to parents and career changers
• Remote work is a game-changer for working parents
• Self-taught coding can lead to real jobs in software
• Apprenticeships offer flexible routes to earning a degree
• Software roles go far beyond just writing code
• Testing involves investigative, problem-solving skills
• Real-world work enhances academic learning
• Flexible hours allow better family-work balance
• Women should not be intimidated by tech
• Employers benefit from investing in apprenticeships

Best Moments
00:01:00. “I was sort of ready to get back into work. But I couldn't go back to college full time.”
00:03:29. “That was really inspirational for me. Just like a witness that you can actually go and get yourself a job without official qualifications.”
00:04:28. “I did the application. I wasn’t really sure whether I would get it. But I got an interview and a job.”
00:07:05. “Programing like actually writing code is not the only area you can go into in software.”
00:09:04. “Remote working is fantastic. I think it's like the only good thing that has come out of Covid.”
00:12:14. “You don't have to actually go in. So that is like, that's brilliant. It's a brilliant model.”
00:15:29. “I think women are faced with an impossible choice of having a career or having a family.”
00:18:32. “If you have a bit of an analytical way of thinking, it's really not unachievable.”
00:20:00. “Apprenticeships open the door to those kind of people... who want to upskill into software.”

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Transcript

0:00

Don't be intimidated by it. It's easy to be intimidated whenever your image of a programmer is in a dark room with lines of code and font, but if you have a bit of an analytical way of thinking, you know it's really not. You do have to learn how to do it, but it's not unachievable. Welcome to work. Plus the podcast that shines a light on the people doing good work across Northern Ireland. I'm your host, Richard Kirk, founder of Work Plus. I've spent years working with employers, schools, colleges and universities, helping young people and career changers to make better informed career decisions. Each week I sat down with real people doing real jobs to explore how they got there, what they've learned, and why their work matters. If you're a parent, teacher, carer, or just curious about what good work looks like today, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Mia, we're delighted that you joined us today on on the podcast. You're currently working in software. Tell us a bit about how all that came about for you. I saw the apprenticeships I was at. I was at home. I had a two kids at home. But my youngest was a year and I was sort of ready to get back into into work. Yeah. But I hadn't, my previous I had been in university before, but I don't need, I had been interrupted due to family, circumstances. And then I went and, you know, my husband and I got married, and we started a family, and we moved, up to the north. I'm originally from. From Cork. Yeah. And it was, you know, I felt it was time the kids were old enough. I felt it was time to get back and get into work, but I couldn't go back to or, you know, I couldn't go back to college full time. It just wasn't going to happen with with family commitments. The commute alone is like, you know, into Belfast is maybe 40, 50 minutes for me. Like, it would just be too. It would be too much to do, full time. Have the kids and, you know, care and all the rest. So I was sort of looking around for different options. My, I was at, I was at a wedding and a cousin mentioned that her, she knew someone who was who was recruiting, like, women in particular. And they were going to train people from the, you know, from the ground up. This is for for us firm. So you could come in with absolutely no knowledge, which was really interesting for me. Ultimately, I didn't I didn't go for that. I didn't apply for that because, I thought that the, the it just wouldn't work at that situation. But but the other, the other, sort of thing that sort of sparked this for me was my sister. She did she did her undergrad in something completely different. Microbiology. And then she had moved, over to the States, and she had a baby. And while her baby was at home and she was nursing her, she self-taught herself, had a program just on her own, whatever online courses she was doing. And a couple of years later landed herself in a software programing job, having done no official qualifications. So that was really inspirational for me. Just like a witness that you can actually go and you can actually go and get yourself a job without, you know, you put in a little bit of effort, put it, you know, but it's not like it's not completely unreachable. While you have a family. And my husband was extremely encouraging to me, and he went and asked some of his family members who were in the industry and maybe some advice. I had the idea of an apprenticeship. I knew that some of the universities in tech offered part time apprenticeships, and his, is his family member came back to us with work. Plus, and they said you know, you should try this. We just heard about this. So I did the application, I didn't I wasn't really sure whether, you know, I would go for it, I would get it. But I was like, look, I'll just put it in anyway. And, I got an interview as a result, and I got a job. And so I started this, this apprenticeship. And you mentioned about this that your sister was the self-taught programmer. Yes. Okay. So. Is that is programing software what you're doing right now? Is that something that you thought about whenever you were a you were a teenager that one day I'd love to do that or to just come. Yeah. Whenever I, my and my brother, I have a brother as well. My eldest brother is a software programmer as well. He does some automation testing, but but when I was a teenager, if I'm honest, it looked quite intimidating. Yeah, I saw his screen and all the code up on my screen. It didn't look. It looked like that was not a for me. Like it was. It was too smart for me. But we did. When I was in secondary school, we did a Lego robot competition where they sound silly like, but they they brought in, you built this Lego robot, but they had this app where you would program the robot. So you had these tiles you put into the program that he would turn right or turn left, and he had to make it around an obstacle course. So that was sort of my first kind of little taster of coding. And then so it wasn't like completely foreign to me. And I was always sort of interested in maths. And, you know, I did applied math for the lead in certain all the rest. And that was sort of I knew that was kind of my area. And I had actually my, my undergrad that I had started was in, engineering, but it wasn't really a very good fit for me. I just didn't it didn't quite click. But yeah, through just a bit of research and I was sort of playing around with a bit of code myself before and what I was still at home and, I just really thought this I could make a go of this, technology I think has gotten it has it has become easier to program than it was back in my brother's day. You know, you had you had very basic languages for now. It has become easier and more accessible. And programing like like actually writing code is not the only area you can go into in software. I mean, there there's a whole host of, you know, different sort of areas you can branch into. Yeah. So there's something for everyone. Definitely. Yeah. So you have a when, when people think of, of software, they sometimes think it's, it's just someone maybe like you're your brother. Lines of code, multiple colors and symbols and things on their own on a laptop. But yeah. Tell us a bit more about what what those rules look like then. So you have your, your your software programmers who write the code and build it. You have, software testers, which I, I would be a, a software tester. So that can be, you know, it ranges from maybe manually testing, a new feature product or, you could be, you know, just exploratory testing would just be like just just going through the website or app and just seeing if it can work. And if you know, if it will work and all of these different edge cases. But but also you would there's, there's a big push now for automated testing. So you do write the code or the program, but you're not building something. You're testing what you're writing a code to automatically go through and test what the developers built. That's more what I do. But you can also be. So there's also, DevOps role, which would be, like how how the how the software actually is up and running and gets onto your computer and all the rest, and all that, you know, you could be a customer support, could be design, you know, there's all sorts. So they're all just all very technical, like design, for example. It's just maybe some time to go past it, but you need to have some level of creativity and or an eye for detail. Yes. There's a lot you can do within that. Do you very much work on your on your own? Tell us a bit about your what a day in the life of of me. Working at team works looks like. Yeah. So the the position that I am is, is fully remote and but they do have an office, in Belfast that we can use if we need it, which is really, really nice because remote working is fantastic. I mean, it is a game changer, I think. I think it's like the only good thing that has come out of Covid is, is the remote work, the shift, remote work. But, like, I couldn't I couldn't work without it. Not with all the family commitments that I have. You know, even just to have the freedom to sort of have your own hours and, you know, be able to do the school runs and be able to sort of manage, you know, kids and life. So I, I would say wake up in the morning and I might get an hour of work done in the morning, then I'll get the kids out to school and get a bit more done. You know, and, you know, and, and the time before they come home from school and then you put the dinner on and hopefully by that stage I'm done. But but I still can keep on working. I might role I do work on my own quite a bit. But I work actually with a lot of, Americans with the majority or a lot of American team. Teamwork is a US based company. So a lot of the meetings that I would have are they don't happen until maybe like

three, 4 or 5: 10:38

00 in the evening. So by that stage, people are home from work. There's, you know, there's, it makes it easier just to manage kids and calls. And I mean, they're they're very good. Now with me going on a call, they know not to come in, but I know, I know it's it's it's it's good. Like it's manageable. It's not it's not easy by any means. You're still, you know, juggling everything. But but it does make it possible. Yeah. I love the way you just said that. It makes it possible because the alternative you were thinking about was. I'm a young mom, and I. I'd like to get into this industry, but I might need to go. I can't go on go to college full time. I I'm I might get not right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So how has, surprised that you know, how has that apprenticeship model worked for you? Well, the apprenticeship, allows you to basically earn your, you know, your full degree part time. So I, I, you know, I go into college, university, one day a week during term and outside of term. You're not in at all. So you have a lot of like assignments that you do in your own time. But again, you you don't have to actually go in. So that is like that's that's brilliant. It's a brilliant model I like again, I couldn't have done full time education. I just like it just wouldn't have been possible. With the one day a week it's fairly manageable. And then with the the actual workload, it is all remote. So again, you can sort of manage your own time better that way. It's the 1140 five minutes from Belfast. Are you able to work remotely. But then that one day you're coming up to. Belfast and and that's really nice actually because remote it suits me really well. But it is nice to have that one day where you go and see people and you interact with people and you have a bit of social. Yeah. To balance it all out. Yeah. What benefit has there been. So you're you're mostly working right. So you're and you're learning from people who are in your team and, and then you're going to university one day a week. Is that one that uni is that helpful. Is that is that giving you knowledge and understanding that you can apply to your work, or is it sometimes working the other way where you're able to go into class and say, actually, this is what I'm doing on my day job to even do the lecture or here to your class. How does that work? Yeah, I would say both. You know, e your work helps you with your course, and your course helps you to work. The course, you know, what you're learning is it's all in the same field, but it might not always be directly relevant to what you're doing. You know, what you're doing right now is, is probably something kind of specific because you're working on a specific project. But the the course does give you quite a broad understanding of the whole, the wide range of things in the technology sphere, like anywhere from the way networks work to, you know, the way that AI works to the way that, you know, if you if you want to study data, you know, data analytics, but but also to the way like you would have a you would set up your process. So like that particular module was quite relevant to, to maybe the tester side because it was, you know, it was something that I had actually done before. So I felt like with that module, I like I already knew the module based on what I had been doing at work, but also what I do in what I do in the modules helps me understand, like more broadly, what is going on at work in, in, in all the different systems that it touches. You and your husband have a, have a farm, isn't that right? So yeah, you're doing you're doing the album on that as well, you know. Yeah. My, my husband, he's a farmer and and a contractor as well. So he has me helping him out a bit with just, the admin involved in that. So the busy days, busy days for you, are the majority of the apprentices in your class or even in team works? There are other apprentices. Are they a similar stage of life to you, or are they. They get younger. But. There's a bit of a mix. I would say probably the majority are school leavers. But there's definitely, there's definitely, you know, older students in there as well. There definitely is, who maybe, how families are working or there's a mix there. Yeah. That's good. And whenever so we've, we've got this project called software for all, which is to, to showcase software as being a great career to go into, and certainly to encourage more females to, to consider that. Why is that something that's important to you? Either my perspective will be coming from, a woman, but also a mother. I think it's a I think it's I think women are faced with an impossible choice of having a career or having a family. And historically, you know, it's very hard to it's very hard to have both of them. But it is it is absolutely possible. It's hard work, but it's it's absolutely possible. And I think, I think apprenticeships really empower, women who do maybe want a more flexible lifestyle. Also the remote working along with the apprenticeship, it really does enable you to to sort of have a more flexible lifestyle and to sort of accommodate the life that you want. And what have been some of the things that you've been most proud of in your apprenticeship so far? Like what? What have you really enjoyed? Whether it's breaking something and then saying, I find a way here that this to me that's better, the product doesn't work. Or maybe it's a little perfect, you know, it's there's. No sound of perfect. But that's my job. My job is to find the imperfections. Well, recently we, there was a bug. So part of part of my part of what I do at work, was whenever, like, a problem comes in from a customer, a customer support person, and engineering. But it's not always. It's always immediately clear what the problem is. It could be user, er, it could be that we actually have a bug in the system, or it could be there's a misconfiguration. And so I have to go through and sort of like investigate. So I could do many investigation on like what's going on. So we, we had one of them that came in and I I've sort of there was a group of users that weren't getting a notification that they should have been getting, and I had to go. I was going in one by one, and I found a plausible answer for it. With 90% of the users. But there were some users that it still didn't make sense for. The reason why this might be happening. So I had to dig further, and, I found out whenever we were looking in the logs, I found out that it was actually it was it was a bug in the way that we were handling, you know, how users were being added or whatever. So, you know, I thought I had almost had the answer, but then I had to sort of keep digging and that sort of persistence for getting to the bottom of it. This is what I really love about the about the work. And at the end of it, I, I don't have to fix that. I pass it on to the other guys and they fix it. So you're like, an investigator trying it, trying to find the the trying to find the source of the problem. Yeah. Yeah. So, so for safer for other women, maybe even young girls at school, even thinking about your own children and what the future might hold for them. What are the messages that we should be sharing with with people who aren't yet in the software industry that that might want to to get involved? Don't be intimidated by it. You know, it's easy to be intimidated whenever your image of a programmer is, you know, in a dark room with lines of code and front. But, you know, if, if, if you have a bit of an, an analytical way of thinking, you know, it's really not, you know, it's you have to you do have to learn how to do it, but it's not unachievable. And there's different areas you can go within software. So absolutely, it's a really good one to be in. And I love the like the software industry I think in particular has a good emphasis on remote working, which is something I really love about it. So it's good. So you are, a living testament to why apprenticeships are good news for for people and for businesses like teamwork. We want to have more employers thinking about that. Like what? What's your what's your message be to employers and software or even outside of software that haven't quite caught the vision for apprenticeships just yet? I think it with apprenticeships you are opening yourself up to people who might never be in the be in the workforce. So you know, whenever you expect, especially especially software. Software is such a changing field. Everything changes so quickly. You could have or you know, people maybe who are who have other careers and who want to, you know, upskill into software. And it's very, very hard to be honest for those people to pursue a career change whenever they maybe have a mortgage to pay for, they have all their groceries to pay for, you know, they can't just give up work and start into full time education again. So apprenticeships open the door to those kind of people, I think. But but even for younger people, you know, younger school leavers, apprenticeships are a fantastic way to teach, you know, school leavers from the get go to really apply themselves and really learn. Whenever you're doing a degree that is just a degree that is just, you know, you're just doing your modules full time. You're not working on the side, you're not really building on your knowledge as you go. You're only, you know, you're learning the theory, but you're not putting it into practice. And by the end of that degree, those those, those students who come out of it, they have all the knowledge, but without having put it into practice, they're, they're they're at a disadvantage. They're, whenever you are able to take someone from, from nothing and bring them up through and mold them into what the kind of employer employee that you want them to be. I mean, I think that's probably invaluable. Finance and you, about the different aspects of software. I don't want to ask, where do you see yourself in ten years type thing, but do you just love testing and yeah. And you're going to keep doing that. Or do you think there are other aspects of software that you want to explore? I do love QA. I, I, I love the sort of analytical thinking, no, I really I just want to really sort of expand my knowledge base. There's, there's quite a lot in QA that I don't know yet. So I, I'm hoping to sort of do a couple of, different qualifications. And I've done keep learning and expand my, automation knowledge as well. Well, just finally, last question is, what's so great about work for you? I think we have just actually a really good team. I think the, the team works have our like they've got a great way of work and, they've got great companionship. It can be quite hard whenever you are a remote company, to find the time to really connect with the people you're working with. But, already we've had, you know, we've had a couple of different get together since, and it's really great like this. Really good people. And, but it's also not, you know, we have a Belfast branch here that is, it's big enough, it's growing, but there's a there's a huge American base as well. So it's it's lovely to get to know them, and get to know all the different sort of, a software that we have over on that site and the people working there, it really expands the mind of people. You do get to know. Well, Mia, thank you so much for your time. It's been great to hear about all you've been up to and OSHA, every success for your career. That's great. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for tuning in to work. Plus, if today's story gave you fresh perspective or helped you rethink what's possible, leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform or hit like and subscribe. It really does make a big difference. For more stories, resources and tools to help guide the next generation, visit workplace Dot. Up. Until next time.