I’m certified! Professional growth and development at Futurice

As a company, Futurice wants to help people reach their full potential. An important aspect of this is supporting continuous improvement through learning and personal development. In addition to hiring new talent, we love to look for ways to help members of the home team grow into new areas! This is largely done through an approach we call the Ultimate Learning Platform. As a part of the platform, we provide training internally and externally as well as encourage the whole company to look for learning opportunities in projects and other aspects of everyday work.

Our certification program is an important part of the Ultimate Learning Platform. Back in 2019 Futurice started an active push to get more people certified in using technologies by our extensive network of technology partners, like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It was started to both help our people get the training they want and better position us as a company in the market.

Michael Samarin, our Head of Cloud and Architecture, is one of the prime movers behind the program:

Stay tuned for more detailed information about our certification program in future posts.

So for almost 2 years, we’ve made sure we do our best to support people in getting certified - what are the results? 108 certified specialists with 279 certificates.

Pretty good.

But as someone once said, “...99% of all statistics only tell us 49% of the story”, so let’s look at one person’s experience with the program.

Namely, mine.

Falling in love with learning all over again

I had worked with cloud technologies since my days as a junior dev, but only maintaining or building upon the foundations that others had laid out. I love learning but find myself daunted by the sheer mass of information available online these days, and fall into the trap of choice paralysis. So when the cloud certification program was announced, it was the perfect opportunity to start to build my foundations for becoming a domain expert in cloud technologies, with a particular focus on AWS.

I am not an exceptionally good learner, often needing multiple repetitions of something for it to really stick, but I persevered and after around 100 hours of study - and a lot of patience from my significant other, I might add - I was able to sit and pass the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam.

But now I was in a bit of a quandary: after completing the first certification there was now a gap in my life where studies used to be. It was almost like finishing high school again. Like… what now…

Well that ‘what now’ turned into a habit of learning and studying, with Futurice supporting this endeavour financially for my time and both mentally and operationally by giving me the opportunity to apply my learning directly in my daily work - be it project work, leading training programs for our clients, or internal initiatives like cloud and data strategy.

Beyond the scope of work, this program reignited my thirst for learning, giving me a productive activity to fill my time in lockdown, and it has had a flow-on effect in other aspects of my life. The focus and achievement from studying inspired me to get back into fitness and martial arts, something I had mostly neglected since my formative years.

When I am motivated and happy, it impacts all areas of my life.