Technology consultant Review

I work with Microsoft products. Specifically, I have been involved in building a Customer relationship management system for a charity, using Dynamics CE. This has involved creating tables, fields, forms, views, charts, dashboards, business rules and more. It has also involved creating Microsoft Power Automate Flows to help automate processes. I have also shadowed on workshops which take place to understand client requirements and how we can best address them in our build work. I’m a functional consultant which means that my work involves low code, as opposed to the technical side which involves more coding.

I had no previous experience of working in tech and had never even heard of the Microsoft technologies that I now work with. I have learnt a lot of new skills, but all very specific to Microsoft technology. I have not been very involved in what I would consider traditional consulting (presentations and analysing data). The skills I have learnt have also largely been self taught. I have been very proactive in finding solutions to tasks I have been set.

It took me 7 months to be put on a project, before which I was not given responsibility. Once on the project I do feel that I had a large part in the outcome and feel that I was given a lot of responsibility, which was great. My manager also gave me a lot of autonomy and essentially set me tasks and then let me go off and work on them. I really struggled when not on a project and when I didn’t have any responsibilities.

Every employee gets a counsellor who supports you throughout your time there - this is a great idea and it has been really nice to have a specific person that I can go to about issues. I felt the training was lacking guidance. We were given a case study to complete and told to take a Microsoft exam (this lasted from September to December) and overall only spent 3 days with one EY colleague learning a bit about canvas apps, and two days with another colleague being shown dynamics. We then had to do our case studies individually. After this, when not on projects for a while, we were just told to do online learnings- we weren’t given a learning plan of which ones would be useful for us to do and I also felt that it wasn’t a good use of my short time there.

The company is amazing. My work life balance is better than it has been in a while and the company is very good about mental health and giving employees time off. We have £500 well-being spend accounts that I have just spent on some fitness equipment and a spa break - which feels a bit unreal. There is also a group called curated experiences who organise free events including chair massages, egg painting and a board game afternoon. The people are absolutely lovely and it really is an amazing place to work.

I have very mixed feelings about my placement. I am glad that I managed to get a placement with such an amazing company. However, I do feel somewhat let down by some things. Specifically, I was expecting to be able to move around and see different areas, to get an idea of what I like, but I applied for tech consulting and ended up in the Microsoft services group which feels extremely specialised. I feel that I haven’t been involved in the traditional consulting that I was expecting. Also within MSG, I haven’t been able to see much of different areas. I was also expecting more team building activities and socials for a big 4 firm. With hybrid work, I don’t see colleagues often and this would have really improved my time here.

Yes

Recently, me and some of the grads have given feedback to our team about what we feel needs improving about the grad programme. A partner saw this and got in touch and is starting to make some exciting changes to get us involved in more and he said he wasn’t sure why none of our opinions reached him before now. I suppose my overall advice is to find this type of person within your own group and note down feedback and improvements that you have as you go along. Getting this feedback to the right person as soon as possible would be beneficial. I think if I’d found him sooner, I would have had a much better placement.