Imperial graduate work shadowing – Elliot

Zaizi

I am a first-year physics undergraduate at Imperial and I spent a day at Zaizi on 29/3/17. I signed up for this scheme because I am trying to decide where I would like to have my career in the future and I didn’t have much experience of what jobs in IT and consultancy are like. I knew this sector was a possible career choice for me because I enjoyed the computing I have already done in my degree.

People at Zaizi

The people at Zaizi were very friendly and welcoming. Rather than shadow a single person I moved through the office and spoke to people who worked in every stage of projects from marketing to support.

First I spoke to Mark Rogers, who is a technical lead. By listening to Mark I got an outline of parts of the agile methodology that Zaizi use and how some of the Alfresco projects are used by the clients. It was interesting to get an introduction to the problems that Zaizi work on solving for their clients. I listened to a stand-up meeting where the employees explained what they had achieved the day before and what they are planning to accomplish during the current day.

I spoke with developers who showed me how they used Git to help make their code, which I think I will now be able to use in my own computing. I was also shown how to set up virtual machines. When I spoke to the people responsible for QA they explained how testing of programs is being automated to save time. They can make a test that can be reused each time the software is updated, which was interesting.

I was shown Jira by a project manager, which is the software the company uses to divide up the work and organise the sprints in the project.

Final Thoughts

Overall I gained an ideal depth of insight into each role at Zaizi and I got a feel for the atmosphere and how the company worked. It will help me make informed career choices in the future. I would recommend shadowing at Zaizi because it is a good size organisation and the employees were very keen to help me understand how the company works.

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