Graduate profiles: Workday Consulting

Read this interview with one of last year's Graduate HCM Consultants, Jason all about his first steps with the company, what attracted him to the role and what keeps him here!

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I'm Jason, I joined Kainos in 2018. Outside of work, when I'm not spending time with my nearest and dearest, I love to play video games and dabble in and out of Les Mills Body Pump classes, when I take the notion to break a sweat!

From a very young age, I can remember being fascinated by technology and being very strong when it came to numbers. This naturally led me down the path of studying a Business and Computing degree, from which I graduated in July 2018, before joining Kainos only 4 days after de-robing!

I work within Kainos' Workday division, as an Implementation Consultant. In basic terms, my work sees me working directly with global customers of various sizes and streams, helping translate and transform their HR requirements from legacy systems into the Workday HCM platform.

I am a Workday Absence specialist, so my role is focused on helping customers set up and maintain their organisation's holiday and sickness configuration, which has allowed me to learn quite a lot about legislation and laws of many countries around the globe.

What support were you given to get to grips with project life at Kainos?

You truly hit the ground running at Kainos. After 2 weeks in-house training, followed by two weeks of Workday training in London, I immediately joined a project in a shadowing capacity, upon my return. From here, I was given responsibility over certain tasks, which were still very new to me, whilst having the backing of a more senior consultant to guide me and review my work. It wasn't too long before I was comfortable enough to lead my own calls with my customers and feel like a 'real' consultant, helping shape their Workday platform with my knowledge.

What does an average day look like for you in your role?

My day starts the same, every single day with a coffee!

I start off my day, like most, by sorting through my emails and identifying high priority tasks that I need to action that day, be it preparing a slide deck for a customer presentation or updating configuration changes that have been sent across overnight.

I'm fortunate enough to still have the guidance of a more senior consultant on my projects, so I normally check in with them throughout the day to identify any of their workload that I can take on in order to gain more experience. Occasionally, I'll get the chance to help a newer consultant get up to speed with a topic and help them through their workload. We really are just one big team!

Sometimes my working day will take place on site with one of my customers and similarly to working remotely from the office or home, I will help them to address any issues and work through these. This can also involve presenting demos in meetings and talking through my ideas for breaking down potentially complex solutions.

Describe a highlight of your time at Kainos.

A real highlight from my time at Kainos has to be the people that I work with. I'm very fortunate to work with a great bunch of people that help motivate, inspire and shape me into a better consultant, day in, day out. There are always opportunities to get involved in giving back to the community through the Kainos Academy, and I've enjoyed keeping in touch with my secondary school by attending their annual careers fair and being there to provide some information sessions to school leavers on our Earn As You Learn opportunities at Kainos. As long as there is a purpose behind a decision you make for yourself, I've found that Kainos always try their hardest to support it.

What appealed to you most about a career at Kainos?

The fact that Kainos offers professional IT career opportunities for those of us that don't have a programming background was a huge point of difference for me, in making my decision to apply for my role. I had always wondered if not studying programming would be detrimental to my career aspirations, but this has been far from the case.

Day to day, the key skills that I need to do my job well involve an analytical way of thinking and being able to dynamically communicate with people, be it a meeting, casual conversation or a presentation to a room full of people. I'm empowered to make decisions around my own career aspirations and to self-identify opportunities to progress my skillset in the direction I choose. No two days are the same at Kainos and I wouldn't want to have it any other way!