Technical Analyst Review

My generic job title is a Technical Analyst, but everyone I work with is also called that! I would call myself a Database Administrator as I administer Databases on a daily basis working with Microsoft SQL, Ingres and Oracle. This could be anything from getting them working again when they fail or checking they're all backed up in case anything goes pear shaped. And when it does, I'm the one that get a call!

For me, it would be writing skills. I was never any good at writing long paragraphs or as the professionals call it "waffling on". I think this is from my previous job where I had to answer a lot of questions fast, I still talk fast but the writing part I have gotten a lot better at from writing 4,000 word essays. I guess you can tell as I'm meeting the word count for each of these sections.

the first year was hard but the most enjoyable, the second year was taught from home so was half as enjoyable as you can't make friends online with classmates. The third year was probably the worst, even though we were back in the classroom and you can talk to people you click with again, the subjects that we were taught and the way they taught them were really not enjoyable. One minute we're learning about file extensions in that a word document has a docx extension and the next they expect us to write a whole python program by ourselves?

The first and second year was very well structures for me, but the third not so much. As described above, it goes from something that isn't even worth learning about because everyone knows about it and is falling asleep in the lecture to writing a whole program by yourself where no-one in the class has knowledge of the language they wanted us to use.

Employer support from Manchester City Council is spot on, my manager and colleagues are always there if I need them just a message away and are always extremely helpful. I'm also given as much time as I need to work on assignments and uni stuff from work in work time. No complaints there.

I have a meeting with my skills coach every 3 months. He is very helpful when anything arises and checks with me that everything is okay. Although everything is fine when I talk to him, I feel that if I did tell him anything was wrong it would be made a big deal out of. But luckily, apart from the learning curve of the third year, and silly subjects that they tried to teach us, I haven't had to raise anything.

It doesn't, the two subjects ever rarely match up, in the second year I did do some SQL stuff but it was very limited and it was stuff that I already knew. To tell the trust, we were supposed to watch a two hour training video on SQL and how to write commands and stuff, but I fell asleep while watching this. You may say that you gain social skills and stuff but I worked in a Library for 7 years previously so I gained all of them there talking to people on a daily basis.

This wasn't provided by uni or anything, but the only groups I joined were through discord. Discord popped up asking if I wanted to join the MMU group. Again, this isn't moderated by MMU but they se up events inside MMU buildings that have been approved like gaming events and movie nights. There were more but I only signed up to these two and have only been to one event.

Yes

Manchester City Council are an excellent employer, in my experience the managers have always been approachable and friendly and it actually seems like they care about you as a person, which is more than can be said for a private company. I have never had any problems with them... apart from one department trying to force me to work in the elections but I just ignore them.

Maybe the best advice is to start as an apprentice. I'm not very good at interviews at all and always seem to fail at them, yet when I apply as an apprentice I always seem to get them. It seems they go easier on apprentices and aren't looking for as many skills and qualifications. Now there's no age limit on them too, it makes them available to anyone.