At 18 years old, I was studying Sports Science in the UK. I enjoyed it but always found myself coming home from school and playing around with my PC, fixing it, improving it and learning about it. I am a self-confessed nerd and tech hobbyist, so I eventually decided to turn that hobby into a career.

The problem was it was too late for me to pivot my education into IT, so to the horror of my parents, I made the decision to drop out from school and enroll in a 1 month crash course to obtain a Comptia A+ certification. After a short time gaining some experience at a local computer repair shop, I was interviewed for an IT support job at a large international consultancy in the heart of London. I was way out of my league and very inexperienced, but the head of IT liked my passion for technology and initiative to take control of my career path.

I was immediately exposed to multiple complex corporate systems that I had never seen before, and as part of a small IT support team, I was forced to learn and adopt processes very quickly. Within a few months, I had taken ownership of the entire new user process and was on-boarding multiple new users per week. Some of my older colleagues didn’t believe that I was only 18, more than once I had to pull out my ID and prove it!

My management gave me the administrative freedom and tools to quickly expand my knowledge and skillset, despite my lack of experience. The culture was strict and corporate, which was very hard to adapt to, but they made a serious effort to drive individual growth and were very patient and understanding with the youth of the organization. I feel that, given the opportunity, young workers can settle into highly professional environments faster than some more experienced workers, mostly due to their eagerness to learn and passion.

After a few years, I moved on to a network / field engineer role that was mostly solo, on-site work. I only had the knowledge and experience to do this thanks to my time in this junior support role.