As a Principal Consultant, my days revolve around juggling the competing demands of contracted work with internal responsibilities, engaging and influencing stakeholders towards making needed decisions, chatting with colleagues, customers and decision-makers over a coffee, and keeping an eye on the corporate inbox for anything which needs a quick response!

My projects to date have been varied, and one of the most rewarding projects I’ve been involved with was planning the rollout of Safeguarding training to Borough Policing. I’ll never know if it has prevented a high profile incident, but it was an important step in the right direction.

Recently I’ve been given line management responsibility for a cohort of new employees. The advice I often give them is to be open to doing a wide range of work when you first start. This gives you a view of what Actica does and the customers it works for, to help shape how you’d like your career here to develop.

I’m based in the Guildford office and manage the admin around projects. This might mean logging new opportunities as they arrive, submitting proposals to customers, invoicing customers, answering calls and other general administration tasks that come up.

Before joining Actica I was doing a Business Administration apprenticeship for a training qualifications company. The work was very similar, however there are more development opportunities here at Actica. I really like this as it means I am able to explore a new path if I want to. For example, I’ve taken up the opportunity to move into a more finance focussed role and have started a bookkeeping course to develop my skills further.

I have been at the company for 3 years, having arrived here after finishing a PhD in physics.

Lots of my projects have been based around managing programmes and helping organisations improve their processes.

My favourite project so far has been looking at how training was organised and provided in a large organisation, where I was working as a Business Analyst. During this project I talked to people all over the country to understand the challenges they faced. The aim was to design new services to improve their skillset, and help them learn faster and more effectively. The team and I successfully designed new services, with the potential to change the organisation for the better.

Although working in the public sector initially felt daunting as a new employee at Actica, once I got up to speed the projects were very rewarding. I know that what I’m working on makes a real difference to people’s everyday lives, and this fills my work with value.

Before working at Actica, I was finishing my PhD in Chemistry. My work now is similar to research in that it requires an enquiring mind and the ability to think on my feet, however I now use a broader focus to understand the changing world.

Typically I’m embedded within client project teams providing security advice. In the morning I may be in a team planning meeting, project planning or on other team activities. In the afternoon I might write a risk assessment of the latest proposed change to a solution, or discuss architecture with the Lead Architect. The client sites are in a variety of places down South, but I generally find I can work from home one day a week.

Continually learning and adapting to new technologies has been both rewarding and challenging. However, I have always been well supported by everyone in Actica when I had any really challenging issues.