Kenechukwu

Why I chose mthree

What made mthree stand out to me was my recruiter – he went above and beyond to build a relationship with me. Herman was always updating me with what’s happening. If there were delays, he’d let me know why and keep me up-to-date with how the process was going. The communication from mthree was great.

And because they took so much time and care to work with me as a candidate, I knew it would be a good place to work.

What I learnt in mthree academy

I found the finance industry training was useful and we learnt a lot. The instructors were very knowledgeable. When they’re teaching us, they’re really talking from experience. They’ve come from the industry and have actually worked in production support.

That’s what stood out for me; learning from people who’ve actually worked in my role and getting a background of the finance industry.

Even though I have a technical background, I hadn’t used Linux before the training. I’m grateful that we learnt it as I use it in my role every day. We use Linux to quickly search through our logs to find the information we need; usually I have four or five different Linux terminals open at the same time!

How I would describe production support

Production support simply means supporting the applications that run in the production environment.

We support the applications that are live – that means people are currently using it. If anything happens to these systems, it’s going to cause challenges for the users. It could even lose them a lot of money.

We make sure that the applications that are used to trade (how the company makes money) is always up-to-date and running the way it’s designed to run.

Applications I support

Our applications support the derivatives teams with swaps. We have jobs that automatically do the calculations needed for the user’s work. These calculations generate a report to tell the users what positions and exposure they have, how much a company is going to pay them, or how much they need to pay a company.

We have jobs being carried out in four different regions and they all have to run to completion. If there’s any delay, we need to let the users know.

We also have critical clients, where if there’s any failures, we need to fix it as soon as possible. If the issues aren’t resolved quickly, it could mean the business losing a customer.

What I enjoy about working in production support

In production support, there’s always an opportunity for you to innovate. If I see any repetitive tasks, I can tell my manager that I want to use Python or shell scripting to automate these tasks.

We have the flexibility to identify what’s not working and use our skills to make it work. You don’t always get that with other roles.

Production support also develops your human relationship skills. We’re always interacting with people around the business, like traders or the operations team. There’s a great balance between the technical and people aspects of the job. It really gives you the opportunity to explore; it’s been a great experience so far!

What I enjoy in my role

I enjoyed writing scripts and I’ve worked on a couple that the team now uses. For example, we have a job that used to take a lot of time, I wrote a script that now automates it.

In my first three weeks, one of the teams needed to solve a problem with Python. They didn’t know where to start so I helped them – now they regularly use my script in their team to resolve issues.

The benefit of joining an organisation through mthree

When you join mthree, you get trained before you start. It sets you up so you’re ready to start working from your first day.

For those in my team that didn’t join through mthree, it took them time to adapt to the environment and work with the systems. But because I’m an mthree Alumni, I was trained by people who’ve worked in production support, so I already knew exactly what to expect.

It gives you an edge so you’re able to start running from day one.