And so it starts! This is the first week on work placement, the final part of my course. It’s all very exciting, but also very nerve-wracking, due to there being so many new skills that I’m going to have to learn. Point in case, this is my first time living away from home, so I have to look after myself and such.

As a side note, these blog posts recalling my time on work placement are written on the same day so that I won’t forget too much detail. It may look weird from a writing standpoint as I’ll be saying “today” across multiple days, but it makes sense to me for the purpose of writing my reports at the end of each week.

Monday

The day started up with trying to figure out the bus route, this is no S2 route from Rosses Point to IT Sligo. Once we got in at around 09:30, we were introduced to the office and all of the employees there. There’s maybe around 10 employees in this office, but it’s not a terribly small office either. We were shown our desk, where we use a laptop that is connected to another monitor (Everyone else has 2 monitors, though they don’t use the laptop screen like me, so it’s still 2 screens).

At around 10:00, we had a meeting with our manager involving general information about the company and the office. Wasn’t a huge number of interesting items, just the general “don’t be an idiot” talk, still important though. At this point, we went back to our desks and told to just read through the document that we were given in more detail and learn about Autotask, the main program we’ll be using for support tickets. However, we weren’t given access to Autotask until the end of the day so a lot of the day wasn’t that productive, just going over YouTube videos that were included in the document.

To be fair, at 13:00, the company got us some buns and cupcakes in the lunch room for us, which was a nice gesture and I can’t complain about that.

All in all, wasn’t too exciting of a day as there wasn’t much to do… for now at least.

Other than that, we had some trouble getting back to the house that we’re staying in, Google wasn’t that explicit about which bus is owned by which company, so we ended up paying more for travel. Need to get that Leap Card sorted out soon.

Tuesday

It’s like Monday, but even less! Really, it’s because our supervisor has been out since we got here so we really haven’t been properly told what to do yet.

“But you should have your own intuitive and drive to learn by yourself!” I hear you cry. Sure, you have a point, but we were told that we need to have a proper introduction to the software we’re going to be using and everyone is busy enough as it is to sit and teach us for the day. That’s why we have a supervisor.

So, for today it was just watching more videos about Autotask, trying to get a Microsoft Partner Network account set up (almost there) and some menial emails. But at least we’re starting to get the hang of the buses.

Wednesday

Well then, it wasn’t that much different from the previous two days. We started off the day by finally meeting our supervisor in person; he’s just as chill as everyone else in the building and at least now we have someone that we can go to with the queries that we’ll have while working in Galway.

In terms in what I actually did, continued with setting up the MPN account. Even my supervisor said that it’s very annoying and confusing to get it working correctly, so that’s reassuring. I was also talking to the guy beside me and he said that when he started working here, he wasn’t doing anything for about a month, which makes me feel better about not doing a huge amount yet.

Thursday

Once again, we didn’t work with any customers, but I’ve made work for myself in following along with a Pluralsight course about Dynamics 365. Might as well refresh my memory with Dynamics before I work on customer’s instances. We also had a meeting about how we should be using Autotask, so now we have to start logging what we’ve done in a day. For the time being, we just put down “Training” and leave it at that.

Only other thing that happened is I submitted my expense claim form to get back the money from the train journey we had last week from Sligo to Dublin, so that’s nice that I’ll get the money back. But yeah, it’ll be next week when we get assigned to working on a product, but we were told it wouldn’t be very difficult tacks that we’ll be working on.

Friday

Final day of the week and did I do anything of importance? Well, more so than other days I guess. Start of the day was more of the same though, with me doing my own thing (In this case, Pluralsight courses on Dynamics 365 and nullable values in C#) but we had a meeting at 14:30 with one of the other employees about the system that a customer has, what entities it has, where to make edits, those sorts of things. We then went through one of the procedures that we’ll have to do if we need to test something on the portal, and I’ll tell you something, I’m going to need to have him show it to me again since it’s very confusing. After work, I got the bus back to Sligo and I couldn’t be happier to be home. Even if it’s only for 2 full days, and living by myself is great and all, it’s good to see everyone again.

All in all, wasn’t a bad week. Sure, most of it wasn’t that interesting as it’s just us getting everything ready, but it’s still important to go through all of the setup. Next week is when things should really start to get going.

Until next time,

– Jamie