Ana is a QA Consultant in Endava from Skopje, who joined our team more than one year ago. As her career path began unfolding, she started jumping into new roles, taking on new challenges. Ana says that she perceives Endava as a company where you can grow wings if you are good at challenging your limits. She is always the joyful and confident person in the office, often being the loudest in expressing her opinion in order to push things forward.

Describe your professional path within the company.

I was hanging on a limb for a while in the previous company when I finally decided I reached the ceiling of possibilities and it is time for me to move on. So I decided to “go on a date with Endava.” I chose this company because I thought the business model would offer me the right context of growing my potential. 

On my 3rd day, I've been assigned a project on .NET - a technology that I hadn’t worked with before and in an industry I wasn’t familiar with (insurance). It's been 3-4 long months, during which I had to learn and keep up with the speed of the project. Everything looked like chaos, but as my Line Manager at the time, told me: "This is your chance to prove yourself. You'll have to do much learning, have to adapt to the new environment, build the process on the new project, but that's how you advance."

I started as a Senior QA Engineer and soon stepped up to a Consultant role. I realised I had unleashed the power of doing new things and working with new people by grabbing every opportunity of investing in new ideas and further developing soft and technical skills.

Ever since the first project, I have received many assignments and projects where I needed to learn new things and put in place processes for testing and frameworks for automation so that those teams can move on with doing their job. Being part of putting in place internal events, client's hackathons and all kind of Internal Endava challenges keeps me away from getting into the routine of the project.  I'm looking forward to what the next year will bring!

Tell us about what drives you at Endava.

It’s the countless opportunities I encounter. If you want to do something, you will for sure find people to support you in achieving your dream one way or the other. If you are the kind of person who likes to get involved, there are dozens of projects, presentations, and events. All you have to do is to raise your hand and show your interest. Also, another aspect I absolutely love at Endava is being able to diversify my daily activities to keep my time at the office fun and to be able to learn something new outside of my current project by bringing people together. For me, this is what Endava does. 

How would your colleagues describe you in one sentence?

One word? Loud. I’m all over the place, trying to push something or someone forward, so it’s probably hard to miss me.

Name some books/tutorials/speeches that affected your career path.

My career path hasn’t been influenced so much by tutorials and books as it has been by people. I had the chance to work with awesome people ever since my first job. What inspires me the most are the kind of persons who are determined to do things right and don’t take “No-can’t do” for an answer. People who take every problem as a challenge to gather more knowledge and better ways of handling tough situations, and firmly believe that our work path should be a continuous learning path. These people come in all shapes and sizes: Project Managers, Team Leads, Technical Leads, Communication Specialists, husband, colleagues. 

However, I would love you to try out some articles by Simon Sinek. They deal with how to keep improving yourself and continuously grow your knowledge. I recently found out that I can resonate with his ideas a lot.

Tell us more about yourself outside of work.

On the opposite of how I am at work, I like to enjoy the silence, in a small, but good company, over a nice meal or a concert. I also love to do some traveling to new places from time to time. Even if I'm wasting time on Netflix (I know, everyone has his guilty pleasures) at home with my husband and our cat, I also like to cook and read books or play some games.

From time to time I want to channel all this experience from work into sharing it with others. An example of this are the events we're organising as part of the Software Testing Community in Macedonia. Together with a small group of colleagues from other domains and friends from other companies, I'm trying to make this community more visible and bring it closer to the people. This somehow gives me the purpose to do something bigger than me, and try to give others the chance to get in touch with professionals from the domain. 

What advice would you give yourself if you were starting work at Endava today?

 "Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder", as Littlefinger would say. Don't wait for someone to tell you what you do, but instead do what you do best and let the others know about it!