Meet our Academy Consultants – Freddie Hughes

The Ten10 Academy offers a range of training for anyone from any background. Take Freddie, who studied business management at Cardiff University before beginning his training. He joined his first client in September 2024 so we sat down with him to learn about his journey through the Academy, what work he’s completed for his client, and how he’s still learning different aspects of technology every day.

How do you feel you’ve transitioned from the Ten10 Academy to your client work?

It was quite a challenging transition, but I would say on the whole [the placement] went pretty smoothly. The Ten10 Academy really gave me a strong foundation in a lot of the core skills that we use at our client site today, so APIs, testing, and stakeholder management. Initially, there was quite a steep learning curve with my client’s specific processes, the technologies, and just the general ways that they work; but with a lot of training, a lot of shadowing and real hands-on experience, I think I adapted quite quickly. Over time we gained a lot more autonomy and a lot more confidence with what we could do and now I think I’m in a position where I can really help the company.

Take us through your placement and tell us what client teams you’ve worked with

I’ve worked with quite a wide range of client teams where we were working on an Excel project. We would extract a lot of customer profiling and a lot of technical specifications from the client site and import them into an Excel sheet which we then used to create a lot of graphs that could track the progress of a project we’re working on. And during that project, we had to think about various stakeholders. We had to think “Do the finance people care about this? Is it important for the tech teams? Is it important for the customer service teams?” In the end, we had to use a lot of frameworks and critical thinking to work [this] out but we worked with finance testers, project managers, and even the CEO will be using some of the things that we worked on!

What parts of the Ten10 Academy training have been most useful in your placement?

Testing has been absolutely crucial for me to be able to troubleshoot and validate API connections. It’s the main thing that I do, to be honest. People really struggle to use APIs (especially the smaller companies that aren’t particularly technologically adapted), I’m there as their first point of contact when they have any issues.

Stakeholder management was also useful for presenting data to different teams, and just generally for who’s going to use what and how can we help them as best that we can. Structured problem solving was a skill that I would say I learned along the course of the training and that definitely was something really useful and helped me sort of visualise issues and break them down.

What is a normal working day or week for you?

I get into the office around 8 am if I can. I’m a bit of a morning person so I like to get in early. Straight away, I’ll look at the issues that have come in with people after my hours ended. I’ll get on the really crucial stuff. If there’s a customer that’s having issues with a fundamental part of their business, then we have to jump on that straight away because fundamentally that’s lost revenue for the company. Then I’ll look at people who are troubleshooting their failed API connections, maybe people who are currently onboarding into the system. I’ll look at the issues that they’re having.

We usually have a daily standup around 10:30 am, where we run through with our line manager what issues we’re having and she gives us advice. How can we move forward? Do we need help with anyone else? Do we need to contact any other teams? There are about 16 people from Ten10 working on the same team, so we have a lot of fun and we have a really engaging great team environment while we’re working.

Has your role and/or responsibilities changed during your time on placement?

Definitely. When we first started, we were doing a lot of shadowing while we learned the ropes, because this role isn’t something that’s just common sense. There are a lot of nuances that you have to learn so we had to pick up what the people who are already excelling in this role were doing. The more time that we spent with them, the better grip we got on what we were doing.

There was a lot of focus learning on my client’s processes, but now I would say we have a lot more autonomy, especially in our API testing and customer onboarding. I took a real lead role in creating and refining the stakeholder side of the Excel project and that was something that we did with total and complete autonomy. We would have these ideas and bring them back to upper management. We’d show them and say, “This is what we’ve been thinking. Do you have anything that you could say about this? Is there anyone that we should talk to about what they might need?”

We’ve been given a really good foundational skill set from Ten10, and not only do we trust ourselves but we’ve proved that we’re worthy of the trust that we’ve been given from our managers and we can crack on with it.

What technology, tools, frameworks, and processes have you gained experience with since starting client work?

I’m really good at structuring and finding errors in people’s APIs. I did a long course on Excel before I came here and that was incredibly useful for the data analysis and creating pivot tables for the Excel project. I’ve done a few PowerPoints for stakeholder presentations and used a lot of the frameworks that we were taught from the Ten10 training. I did the power interest grid for stakeholder management which was crucial for figuring out who we needed to aim our project at. Generally, we’ve worked in quite an Agile way, we do our standups and we try and be as responsive as we can to any change that comes through.

How has your client supported your development?

We have quite a lot of standups as I mentioned before. We usually have one a day, but I sit about three feet from my line manager so if I’m ever having any issue, she’s right there for me to ask questions and she’s always ready and willing to help. We have a lot of training sessions on APIs and internal nuances of the way my client do their business. The shadowing at the start means I now really understand what it is that we’re doing and how we can do it best.

I would say the biggest thing that my client has given me to support my development is just a level of trust and a level of autonomy because if they believe in you then you believe in yourself, and if you believe in yourself then there’s no telling what you can go on to!

What support have you received from Ten10 during your placement?

Every month or so we are visited by managers who come through to debrief us, find out how we’re getting along, and learn what could they pass on to the managers that maybe we didn’t want to say directly about the ways that we’re working. They talk a lot about the project, how we’re getting on, how we’re developing our skill sets, and where we think it’s right for us because this isn’t the end of our career. There are next stages for us and Ten10 really try to make sure that you get the best support that you can and ensure your next role will be right for your skill set.

The continuous training and guidance from all of the trainers have taught us so much during our Academy time. The trainers have actually been in quite a lot of contact with me trying to give me some insights on my client’s testing homepage, which I really do appreciate, and I think I formed good relationships with all of the trainers. So it’s nice that we’ve stayed in touch.

What would you say to someone considering joining the Ten10 Tech Academy?

Go for it! There’s no guarantee in your life that you will end up where you want to be, but if you take every opportunity that’s presented to you and you really give it your all while you’re there, then I think that it can do a lot for your career.

Moreover, if someone in the Academy sees this and wants any advice, the thing I would tell you is just to soak up as much knowledge as you can in every aspect of the business. You might have this idea of what you want to be, and you may write off these other parts, but the great thing about working in tech is that everything is so linked together. You’ll need skills from every avenue of tech if you really want to excel in your career and do the best job that you can.