Certified Pega System Architect - Apprentice

I'd been in my team for 18 months, and I was settled. The Pega opportunity came along, and everything changed! I was hoping to move into Development anyway, and so I started to think...but that's another story!

I am writing this diary in my hotel room in Worthing, wondering where the last 8 weeks of training have gone...wondering whether I'll be able to perform in my new team, and whether I'll find out there's been a mistake and so I'm not going to be a Pega Developer after all! The new role is certainly something I'm looking forward to. Building my network as well as learning and working with new technologies cannot be a bad thing! The same can be said for my initial training - I've met a lot of new people, and learnt a lot...but of course I still have a lot to learn! As they say, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

My training started with two weeks of Enterprise Architecture. This taught me the basics of analysing processes effectively, which I then found useful when we moved onto Pega 7. When starting with Pega 7, I did not really know what to expect, I must admit, as my searching through the internet brought back various images from previous versions of Pega (and of course as I didn't know what I was looking for, I didn't know which were Pega 7 images!). It slowly all started to make sense, and I took my exam. I remain convinced that I actually learnt a lot after the exam, as parts of my further training were a mock Sales project, and writing exam questions for the benefit of those taking the exam at later dates. Of course, to write the questions, I needed to know the answers! This was not always the case initially, so I did a lot of research to ensure my answers were correct...

I am on my final week now, and things are going well. I've found that I most enjoy the challenge of learning how to integrate with an external database, so my project has quite a few different techniques of linking things together!

On an unrelated note, living in a hotel Monday-Friday really does have its perks. I’ve really enjoyed staying there for the last 8 weeks, and will truly miss some of the people I have met! Must admit that the food has been amazing as well, would recommend the restaurant to anyone!

The above all goes to show that Capgemini really does give you the opportunity to move to different areas, and try new things to build you as a person and a professional. Who knows where I will be in a few years? Hopefully in whatever I do, I will be doing well.

As in my first "Day in the life of..." story, I continue to know that Capgemini is a good company, for whom I am out to do my best!

Ben Harper Certified Pega System Architect (!)