Technical Background
For those wondering: "How technical is she?"
While working people-first, my technical experience is an important cornerstone for my work in various delivery and coaching roles. To support and lead experts in tech well, it's best to have done technical work yourself. Check out my history below to get a feeling for my technical experience.My roles these days are less technical by nature, but I challenge myself to keep learning about emerging tech and best practise so I can collaborate in the best way possible with the subject matter experts on my team.
Technical History
Starting in the UK Tech Sector
"You spoke about gaming as a hobby, does this mean you're technical at all? Would you mind taking a short tech test?"These simple yet important questions ended up being my gateway into Tech when interviewing for a role in Customer Service. I'm still grateful to the person doublechecking with me on this, as I had just arrived to the UK from Germany and was trying to find something to pay my bills - while waiting for my German physiotherapy diploma being recognized by the relevant UK health authority (which took months!).I ended up enjoying my new job as technical support for speech recognition software so much that I decided to stay in the role, despite having the option to continue work as a Physio!
Welcome to Edinburgh, Scotland
Getting to grips with all levels of IT support
My next IT support role may have started out with a 'Junior' in the title but quickly grew arms and legs thanks to my supportive seniors who gave me a wide bearth for growth.From basic ticketing support to server administration, experimenting with scripts, breaking things (oops!), over to learning more about business processes, asset management, cybersecurity regulations - I literally got a stab at everything.This included moving all our users from on-site to remote working thanks to the pandemic. I've crawled under desks, despaired over rebellious laptops that didn't want to self-configure upon unboxing in the end user's home, and I even delivered a keyboard to someone's doorstep - on inline skates (it was on my lunch break ;-)).
Shipping IT materials around the office
Building a Technical Support Team from scratch
Being the first hire in the Technical Support team for a vertical farming start-up, I got the chance to build everything from scratch. Setting up ticket systems, mapping and implementing support processes, creating knowledge bases, implementing ways of working - including Agile practises!This was in a world where hardware engineering met software engineering, with the support team sitting between the two worlds as a connective link. One day I was working hands-on with on-site maintenance engineers to help harvest plants and learn all about how the machinery worked, the next day I'd be managing a production issue remotely or troubleshooting a bug together with one of our software engineers, sifting through endless error logs, config settings, and database records.I also started working on the BA side alongside Product Owners and Designers, gathering user requirements, discussing features and managing releases. The rest is history - I ended up moving into less technical roles with more leadership responsibilities, but I'll never forget my roots and the great times I had in all my mainly technical jobs.
Me at the IGS stall at COP26 in Glasgow - a vertical farming tower in the background!
Continuous Learning: Digital Accessibility and Sustainability
Having worked as a consultant in Technology, I have now gained a lot of insights across all disciplines - delivery, product, UX - even some business development!You can find out more about the work I've done in my favorite areas Agile Delivery and UX in their dedicated spaces, but I'd like to take the opportunity to shine a light on my continued upskilling on more technical matters: As someone who's interested in using tech for good, I have spent a fair amount of time now learning about Digital Accessibility and Digital Sustainability.For both areas, there is a lot of opportunity to do this through technical improvements, so it was impossible not to dive deeper into this!
On the accessibility side, this includes getting familiar with WCAG standards and regulations, learning how to use automated accessibility testing tools such as WAVE or Lighthouse, giving manual testing a try, and leading the development of a delivery method for an Accessibility Audit. As I prefer to win over people's hearts and minds, I also drove the design of an Accessibility Sensory lab and ran the first accessibility meet-up for my department at work!
A snapshot of our 1st Accessibility Meetup in Club Grace at AND - including a sensory lab.
On the sustainability side, I was majorly influenced by my work in Vertical Farming, as well as my coach Jo, who brought me into the professional sustainability community. I've learned about the principles of Green Software, how to measure the carbon footprint of your solutions and how Agile & Sustainability might go hand in hand. There's plenty more to uncover as this is still an emerging field, but I am excited about it!
"It's not easy being green." - Kermit the Frog