Technology – Chris, Engineering Manager
Learn more about working in Technology and why Which? is a great place to work and progress your career.
Current position
My role is very much a servant-leader, where I support our product teams to ensure they have the right capabilities and lack of impediments to be able to do what they need to. This can involve direct individual and team mentoring, training and facilitation, particularly in areas where they would have a lack of knowledge or experience. I also line manage both engineers and line managers, helping them to grow professionally to achieve their own career goals. I also provide technical support across the wider business, where projects and programmes have a technical element. This usually comes in the form of consultancy, although can also mean placing and supporting engineers within those projects. As one of my current key responsibilities, I am heavily involved in the recruitment and onboarding process, not only defining and managing it but also participating to ensure we bring in the right people with the right skills. Finally, I am involved with the rest of the engineering leadership in developing and implementing an engineering strategy that aligns to the wider business strategy.
Key Experiences
Pretty linear career path, from junior through to engineering manager
Straight after university, where I gained an HND and degree in Computing, I worked to convert databases into books and CD-ROMs (think British Rail Timetables or Dunn and Bradstreet Company listings). This quickly changed to websites too, and I was able to move into web development full time shortly after. Since then, I have worked for a variety of agencies and companies on SAAS-based products, using a variety of different languages and have worked across the entire development stack from frontend, backend and infrastructure, although my interests lie within the frontend field. Having worked through Junior, Mid and Senior roles, I moved into management and found it required a completely different set of skills - such as managing expectations of clients, stakeholders and direct reports. The transition was difficult, but again worth it, as I gain great satisfaction out of supporting people to achieve their very best.
Motivation for working at Which?
I get real satisfaction out of helping people, whether that is helping my reports grow through mentoring and training, or helping teams and even the wider business achieves their goals - and ultimately helping our customers achieve theirs. I do still love the technical challenges that drove me as a developer, although the focus has now changed as I get more involved in high level architectural decisions now.
Greatest achievement
Achieving both my MBA and AWS Solutions Architect certifications
It was a real coin-flip between this one and achieving my MBA, as both pushed me completely outside of my comfort zone and both required hard work, commitment and motivation to achieve. Studying for my MBA required a massive commitment, as it took me 4 years to achieve, while still working full-time, and during that time becoming a father for the first time. It also pushed me to look at subjects that I had not had to really look at before, such as strategy and economics. Similarly, even though working with AWS is a technical skill, one more aligned to my background and experience, I found it extremely difficult as I was front-end focussed at the time, and this required a shift not only to the backend but also further, into infrastructure and networking, of which I had no real experience at all.
Top advice
Hard skills will get you hired, soft skills will get you promoted
I saw this the other day on Twitter, and found that it really resonated with me. My understanding of this is that it is easy to document your knowledge and technical skills on a CV and is relatively easy to test those skills during interviews. However, it is a lot harder to talk about soft skills in this manner, although the interview process should take into account some of these, such as verbal and written communication. While those technical skills will mean you are able to do the job, it is your softer skills, such as communication, relationship-building and work ethic that will be noticed most by your colleagues and managers.
What do you expect from your future colleagues who might join your team?
Which? has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure a good onboarding for new colleagues, especially with the move to hybrid and remote working. We have a large amount of documentation available on our intranet, as well as checklists to complete through your first few weeks of starting.
For Engineering specifically, we have a full plan for the first three months, including specific checklists for system access, meetings and training. You will also be assigned a buddy, who you can turn to for any day-to-day questions and who will be available for training and code pairing, where necessary. We also do not expect you to hit the ground running, as we realise that there is a large amount of information and context you will need to understand, so expectation revolves around you learning and contributing slowly at first but building up as you become more aware of the codebase and customer requirements.
From my personal experience, the first couple of weeks simply involved introduction meetings, handovers from a departing colleague, reading the documentation and getting up to speed with the engineering function. From there, I took on small tasks and responsibilities that then grew as I became more accustomed to the team and organisation. I was never pushed to accept tasks I was not capable of completing or accepting responsibility without support.
Join our Talent Network
Once you've completed this form, you will be redirected to our interactive insider discussion page, where you can find out more about what it's like to work at Which?
Thank you! We'll be in touch.
