On this page my relevant skills from IT to general day to day interaction with people are covered.

IT Skills

My principal skills in IT are programming in Java and C#. My experience in Java comes from university, since my course was primarily based around this language, of which my dissertation made good use of. I have a strong understanding of the basic and intermediate concepts of Java and am very comfortable working with the Swing and Awt packages for creating GUIs. I also have a firm awareness of many advanced features of the language such as multi-threading and 2 and 3-dimensional graphics. Most of my knowledge in C# comes from my career which has taught me a great deal about the .NET framework and features of C# which are unique to the language when compared to Java, such as the way events are handled. The time I've spent at my current company has also improved my SQL knowledge and this has also been broadened by my work on this website which makes use of a MySQL database. Furthermore this website has also given me much experience using HTML, CSS and PHP. Originally these were all things which I wished to learn myself since they didn't feature too heavily in my course at university and this was one of the motivations for creating this site. C++ was also a part of my course, however this was to a much lesser extent relative to my exposure to Java and it only covered the basics of the language, which I became comfortable with. In addition to the skills I have in IT which are language based, I also have considerable experience with several software packages and applications. These include Microsoft Office, Macromedia Studio MX, Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and AccuRev (two different version control and configuration management systems).

Domain Knowledge

My primary domain knowledge is obviously in IT, however more than just knowing how to program in various languages, I also have experience in working in and managing IT projects. This experience has come from two projects I have completed at university, the first, a second year software engineering group effort and the second, my third year dissertation. The first project - known as SEG - was a team project, where the aim of the project was to design, build, test and evaluate an online photograph repository. More than this though was the fact that for each stage of the project (requirements, design, implementation etc.) one of the members of the team was elected team leader, where their role was to plan, manage and coordinate the project and the team. Each week we also held a meeting where the progress of the project would be reviewed, new work would be given out and ideas would be put forward and conflicts negotiated. My third year dissertation was much the same as this except that it was an independent effort which was managed completely by myself with input from my supervisor. Both projects required very accurate and precise time planning and towards the end of certain deadlines, being able to perform under pressure.

Outside of IT, I have a knowledge of the financial markets, which has grown from my interest in them. As well as having an overall high-level understanding of the markets, I also have a more detailed knowledge of trading interest rate futures. Primarily this has come from my career, however a large proportion of my knowledge of the markets has been self taught, since I have a real desire to learn more about this area and make an active effort to do so.

Soft Skills

Throughout my life, experience has given me many soft skills. Perhaps one of my strongest soft skills is my problem solving abilities, which are aided by my logical thinking and mathematical/analytical mind. Primarily it is my education which has given me these abilities, particularly my A Level in Mathematics and my third year dissertation. Additionally I also have very quick reactions and am able to think on my feet; together these sets of skills allow me to be a very quick and accurate worker.

From my project management experiences, I also have the ability of being a good decision maker who is able to make the right call. This is demonstrated by a problem which was encountered in the SEG project, when during the design stage, after it had been decided that we would use JSP for the implementation, the requirements of the system were changed and we were told that we were now only allowed to use PHP for the implementation. This was potentially disastrous for the team since we now had to alter our design to meet this change but we were already nearing the deadline. I knew that we had to begin working on the changeover straightaway and that waiting until the next meeting could cause the project to fail. After doing some research on PHP I identified how the main system structure had to be changed, I then called an immediate meeting to consider these issues and after lengthy discussions we decided upon a new design as a group. It was then time to distribute work and I knew that the easiest way would be to have everybody altering the work which they had previously been doing but also helping out other team members with aspects of the design which they themselves had requested to be present. The strategy worked well and the design which was produced turned out to be very stable. Additional skills developed during this project and my third year dissertation were risk analysis, cost estimation, good communication, identifying problems and their solutions and of course team building and networking

When working in a team I always make sure that I am highly approachable and begin to network with everyone as quickly as possible. I am very much a team player and like to get involved in all areas of the team's work from ideas and problem solving to setting tasks and helping others; contrast to this I also have a very strong initiative and can carry on with work alone. Aside from working on the same level as other team members I am also able to take the lead when necessary and try to progress the team's efforts by listening to others, managing conflict and motivating the individuals. Although I do perform well in a team, I do like having my own work to complete independently and find that having individual assignments which form part part of a team objective works well.

With every piece of work that I produce, both in a team or independently, I am highly motivated to complete it to a high standard and always pay attention to the detail but without sacrificing the overall objective. Being a quick and flexible learner I am able to take on new and varying tasks relatively easily and often enjoy being set new challenges and having something to drive me such as understanding why things happen, how things work and how things relate to each other. It is my competitive nature and desire to excel which keeps me motivated and working hard; this applies to all areas of my life, beyond just work.