Six months ago, we wrote about our involvement in the training, mentoring and job placement scheme AWS re:Start. We’re delighted that for one of the people we sponsored it ended in the best possible way – with a job.

Former army medic Gus Pollard joined the scheme towards the end of last year, and after his initial training we took him under our wing, trained him some more and then placed him with a client, Co-Op Funeralcare, for his work experience.

The nature of our business – we work with highly experienced practitioners, typically with at least 8-10 years’ experience – means that there wasn’t a position for Gus with us at the end of his work experience contract that was an ideal fit for his next step.

However, the experience he gained, coupled with his own dedication, meant that he had several job offers, one of which he has now accepted.

We asked Gus how he’d found the experience overall:

“During my time at Equal Experts, I was able to partner with highly-experienced DevOps engineers and gain a great deal of exposure to various technologies and tools. This includes, but is not limited to working with Terraform, Python, Jenkins, Puppet (a little bit), Bash, Ansible, Groovy (Jenkinsfiles) as well as operational software such as Jira/Confluence. Now, these may seem like routine tools to many of you – but those at Equal Experts have over 10 years of experience at a minimum. As I came into this completely fresh from outside IT, I was thrown into the deep end. Sink or swim – just the way I like it! Overall it was an amazing experience which I will genuinely treasure, and it acted as a springboard into the ever-evolving world of IT.”

The video above is of Gus at our annual conference, where he made a short speech about his experience with Equal Experts called ‘Accomplishing the impossible’. Thanks for your kind words, Gus.

It’s been so gratifying for us to see Gus come in, learn and now thrive, and we couldn’t be more thrilled for him that his experience, both with AWS re:Start and with us, has been so positive. Good luck with your new job, Gus!