So, ‘what have you been up to?’ I hear you ask me. Well because I am now in Transition Year, I get to have my first experience in work! For the past two weeks I have been working in Cora Systems in their Carrick-on-Shannon offices.
Cora Systems is a company that provides “Enterprise Portfolio, Program and Project Management (E-PPM) solutions and services” for big clients, such as Intel and HSE. They were founded in 1999 by Pat Henry (the CTO) and Philip Martin (the CEO)
Why Cora?
I decided to go to Cora Systems for my work experience because I wanted to find out about another side of a technology career that I had never seen before. I was really nervous on my first day but everyone was super friendly. Still, I could barely gather the courage to make it to the kitchen for lunch! Throughout the two weeks however I opened up and began to really enjoy talking to the people in the office. Everyone had funny stories to tell or interesting work they were doing to hear about.
But what were you doing?
I was working on a project all by myself. The problem I had to try to fix was “how can teams share what they are working on in real time, in a way that does not create extra work?” another way of saying this is how can we improve internal communications in the office? I had to decide what tools the office could be using to communicate that would be better than what they were already using. In order to decide this I had to interview, research, put together a report and present the project to a group! All in two weeks! It was a good thing I like to be busy or else I may have collapsed under all the work.
My thoughts
I can’t believe I’m saying this but I loved working in the office. In fact yesterday was my first day back at school in work experience started and I was dreading it. It was so boring compared to all the exciting work and conversation in Cora Systems. I’m really happy and grateful that Cora Systems took me in because I believe it’s an experience I won’t be forgetting soon.
If you want to see my presentation or project report, click here