Catherine

Catherine’s Acturis journey

The interview process

I applied to Acturis in 2019 through a recruiter, completed a short online test and was invited to interview in the Birmingham office soon after. The interview consisted of meeting several members of the team and completing some basic coding competency exercises.

I was quite nervous about interviewing, given my background and also having had some bad experiences in another traditionally ‘male’ industry beforehand. However, the interviewers put me at ease and the atmosphere in the office was very friendly and approachable, which is why I chose to accept a role as an Integration Developer.

The role

My job role involves working to build bespoke products and features for our clients, as well as developing tools for the Business Analysts to use. Most of my time is spent working on back-end code, however getting involved in developing our tools suite has allowed me to get some experience with some full stack development too.

I didn’t know much about insurance before I joined, and it definitely isn’t a requirement for working here! The company puts a lot of time and effort into providing all the training you will need, and really supports your development as you start out in the industry.

We have a big focus on platform stability and on building reliable solutions whilst also writing well thought out, quality code. You are always encouraged to contribute ideas for code improvements, even from a junior level.

The company is well versed in employing recent graduates and does well to avoid the feeling of “throwing you in the deep end”. Before starting at Acturis, I had no experience with .Net and C# which is the foundation of most of our code however there are plenty of training exercises and smaller tasks available to get you up to speed.

There are lots of opportunities to gain more specific experience if you find an area of work that interests you. For example, I expressed an interest in improving my experience of handling database operations and am now part of a small sub-team that oversees our database interactions and improvement which I have found really rewarding.

The team leaders are very approachable and are genuinely interested in knowing what projects you have enjoyed working on and would be interesting in working on in the future.

The work environment

The atmosphere in the office is great. Everyone is very easy to talk to and it’s a very collaborative environment.

There is also a great social element both within our team and across the office. We have a few whole office events each year and each team also has a social budget for organising their own activities, in the past we have been to a VR playground and axe throwing as well as for team lunches/dinners.

There are lots of activities organised outside of the official office events, for example, a group of us like to go bouldering once a week and there are groups that meet up for badminton, board games and lots of other things.

I have learnt a lot working at Acturis for the past two years, gained a lot of valuable experience and made some great friends along the way!