Based in the UK, Pravin Durai is a consultant with Sandhata. Pravin shares the story of his career journey, his experience as an intern and his thoughts on the future.
How did you get started working in IT?
I have been working in IT for 5 years now, and have been with Sandhata Technologies for the past 1.5 years. My career as a software engineer started with Accenture (in Bangalore, India) in 2016 as a Performance Engineer and then I moved to a Developer role.
In these past 5 years I have worked on various project as a performance engineer and developer. Working in many different roles has given me exposure and helped me to understand the complete SDLC.
Recently I have completed a Masters in Computer Science with Industrial Placement.
Why did you decide to pursue a Masters?
I have always wanted to do a post grad degree, and I was inspired by my cousin who did his Masters in the US. But after my graduation, my parents wanted me to work so I started my career as a software engineer. However, I never gave up on my dream of pursuing a Masters. After working for around 3 years I started preparing for the Masters exams at the Queen Mary University of London.
Why did you choose to do a Masters course with an industrial placement year?
The primary objective of doing a Masters is to get an opportunity to learn and to work on some niche and cutting edge skills. I thought the addition of an Industrial Experience year would be a perfect opportunity to test my knowledge gained during my Masters. Also, I was certain that this would increase the odds of me getting a job offer in the UK.
What was the most useful or interesting thing you learnt in your Masters?
During my Masters we were given assignments for each module. Back in India during my undergrad almost all my assignments were theoretical. But on this Masters course it’s the complete opposite and I really liked that. Concrete, real-life projects helped me to understand things in a much better way.
How did you hear about Sandhata?
My Masters dissertation was on the subject of “Cloud Computing”. During my Masters, my professor wanted me to showcase my project to an actual IT company and get feedback. I had been following Sandhata Technologies on LinkedIn for a while and thought they would be a good choice to help me out with this since they have expertise and experience in delivering cloud migration projects for clients. So I approached Sandhata via LinkedIn and they were quite happy to support me.
How did you find your intern role at Sandhata?
I was interacting with Kumar [one of the Sandhata management team] to get feedback on my dissertation and he mentioned about an interesting project where they have an application in .Net and they were looking for someone to convert that into a Java based application. Since I had already worked on similar technology in my previous role, without a second thought I asked if I could work on this project. This is where my journey with Sandhata began.
“I am lucky that I have got the opportunity to work on many different technologies in a short period of time which has broadened my knowledge and experience.”
Please share a bit about what you did on your internship.
During my internship, I worked on a couple of projects: one for one of our clients, Vodafone UK, and the other one was an inhouse project. I particularly enjoyed my first project as I was lucky to work with some very bright people within Sandhata, from whom I learnt a lot.
How did you find joining Sandhata during the COVID pandemic?
Although I started my graduate role during COVID pandemic, the onboarding process was quite smooth. I received my laptop and new joiners kit much quicker than I expected and was supported the whole way. People within Sandhata are very friendly and helped me a lot to setup everything, guiding me whenever I got stuck with any issues.
Now you have moved from an intern role to a permanent role. How are you finding it?
Since I have joined Sandhata, I have always kept my eyes open, looking for any new opportunity. When I moved to a permanent role, one opportunity that I got is to work on the GCAT application. This was a great project for me as there was a big learning curve on new skills and I gave lots of demos to the client, quickly becoming confident and managing to answer their questions thoroughly. The project was delivered on time and the client was very happy with it, which has helped me to prove that I am a strong resource in the team.
What is next for you, Pravin?
I see there are lots of interesting areas e.g. DevOps, Pega, Salesforce within Sandhata which I haven’t worked on so far. I would like to work in these areas to broaden my experience and grow my skillset.
My journey with Sandhata Technologies is just getting started…
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Pravin Durai
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