Is there a better recipe for disaster than changing career, dive headfirst into a new industry, meet a new team only virtually, leave your home and move to a new city - all while in lockdown in the middle of a pandemic?

Following 25 years working in post trade banking roles, an opportunity arose to try something different - FinTech.

Who am I? 

This must be an important question for anyone who is reading this article, right? I am a Consultant Engineer & have worked with organisations of different scales and domains like E-Commerce, Media and recently FinTechs. As a consultant, we move around between different clients and each time we are reborn with some fond and not so fond memories of our experience. Hence you are reading an article from a five-month-old toddler reborn as a Platform Engineer consultant in Fnality. 

Going back one year to February 2020, I would have never imagined what was about to happen. I was – and probably I still am – in love with the City of London. I love its narrow alleys, its old buildings which seem ready to tell a unique story of trade and people from all over the world. I love its corners and squares, the coffee shops. Hence, it’s not hard to believe that, at the beginning of March 2020, as the Government announced the first lockdown advice, I felt somehow in despair. Yes, I knew what was coming – but I wasn’t emotionally prepared for that! 

Being T-shaped refers to the wealth of skills and experience someone may have, and is particularly useful in the world of recruitment when looking for strong employees or the most desirable candidates.

At the beginning of 2020 a fully remote job was a dream for many people… In 2021 it is a reality – but working from home brings a new set of challenges alongside any benefit.

The sudden and ubiquitous shift to remote working has been called ‘the largest behaviour-change experiment in the history of humanity’, and it has been interesting to observe the ways in which friends and colleagues at Fnality have managed the challenges of these changes while discovering and embracing the opportunities that they present.

Remote working has always been available to all Fnality’s employees, nevertheless, going to the office every day was still the “norm”.

Covid-19 has caught us all unprepared, but we’ve quickly learnt to stretch the boundaries of remote collaboration through our new Remote First ways of working. 

Overall, we have discovered that we are still able to perform & deliver – actually we have performed better than ever! The Fnality community that we had built, was still able to flourish despite the distance and this led us to feel more committed & close to each other. We’ve turned our daily interactions into virtual coffees, buddy catch-ups, end-of-the-week quizzes & games, mental health and...

There is no doubt that more and more material is published every day which reassures us that if our careers are not quite following the linear route we expected, this is OK. In many cases not just OK, but that such a ‘squiggly’ career is actually full of advantages (see The Squiggly Career by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis). Industries are changing far quicker than in the past, so the norms that applied to those starting out 30 years ago just aren’t applicable today. Those who stay at one company for the duration of their career are no longer held in high esteem and are more often than not viewed with incredulity. So, with this rate of change in industry, technology, and the age of instant...