James Anderson - Apprenticeship Case Study

I joined Invotra in November 2020 after completing a Level 3 BTEC in IT. After finishing my BTEC I saw that Invotra was promoting a Level 3 apprenticeship in Software Testing, so I decided to apply. I looked into the company more and it looked like a friendly environment to work in with people who would support me during the apprenticeship.

I never really considered going to university, I like being at home, or fairly close to it, and with university I was concerned after spending 2-3 years learning I would still have little to no work experience, so I decided to go with an apprenticeship to learn whilst getting valuable work experience.

I didn’t have any software testing experience before I joined Invotra, but I did spend around 1 ½ years, during my time at college, helping out at the company my dad worked at, helping their internal IT staff. I helped them clear their storage/server room, reset company phones and laptops, installed new hardware on desks and learned bits about the company as a whole.

When I first joined Invotra I was mainly focused on doing Internal QA and testing on the integration environments to help build my knowledge of the product and testing process. My responsibility was to ensure that new tasks that had been developed passed the earlier stages of QA so that they could then be implemented to customer environments.

Since I started I have become more knowledgeable about the product and as such I have become more involved with the customer level testing part of our work. I get involved in the live releases of customer live environments, I have been involved in projects and have made a test plan for a recent project. I am also well versed in running and compiling results from our performance tests for our customers. There are lots of developments happening with our product and I am looking forward to improving my knowledge and involvement in this, especially in how we are using GitHub in the testing process.

Over the course of the apprenticeship I have been given lots of useful tips from my colleagues to help me during the QA process, including certain parts of functionality, using Jira and making filters for testing, and lots of advice to help complete my apprenticeship, from the many current and ex-apprentices at Invotra.

I’m over half way through my apprenticeship and have completed the required examinations to pass, as well as others that have helped to build my knowledge. I am now focused on gathering information and evidence to help complete my portfolio, following the requirements as I go.

I hope that I will continue to work at Invotra once I complete my apprenticeship, continuing to polish my skills and learn more. As I develop, I may look to learn more about roles in other parts of the business, but at the moment I am concentrating on completing my Software Testing Apprenticeship.