02 March 2021
Our 2nd story for National Careers week is from Norbert Jakab, who shares his experience of the training and mentoring scheme available at FirstPort.
I will have been with Firstport for 5 years in May. Working in the role of a concierge, I have been dealing with daily email and phone enquiries, contractors, managing deliveries and keys for residents. At my last review, my line manager suggested I have a look at training opportunities within the business; and this is how I came across the mentorship program (and I wish I knew about it sooner).
After contacting our Learning & Development team, I expressed my interest in cybersecurity and they connected me to put me in touch with the Head of that department, Sawan, this is where my journey started on FirstPort’s mentor programme.
Sawan and I agreed on an action plan with some relative schedules, with an emphasis on me achieving a quintessential cyber security certification. This is an entry-level certificate, which carries a minimum of 2 years recommended experience in IT prerequisite in order to pass the exam.
Now I have never worked in IT or studied computer science, however started studying for this exam back in 2019. I had studied for about 2 months and tried the exam; I failed. However, when we started our mentoring, I had realised that some of the questions I could have answered and achieved pass score, if: 1. I had studied more, 2. I had better understood the trick behind the questions. First, I told Sawan I didn`t think I could pass without the 2 years’ experience, but he kept insisting and trying to figure out how to go about it, he is really good at boosting confidence levels. I then came up with a theory, which he agreed with: if I strengthen my analytical thinking, I will be able to figure out the trick behind questions and answer correctly so we had a few sessions that focused on going through tricky questions.
We started the mentorship in October 2020 and the relative due-date for me achieving the certificate was February this year; however, after we had those tricky-question sessions and the boost of confidence, in December, shortly before Christmas, I decided to take the exam…and passed!
FirstPort’s mentoring program helped me with;
- boosting self-confidence
- improving my already existent analytical thinking by taking it to a whole new level
- realising, that no matter what the requirements are for something, say an exam in this case, success can still be achieved if there is will and passion
I enrolled into this mentorship program to push my boundaries and progress my career. FirstPort and the mentoring scheme have allowed me to do just that; helped to explore this passion of mine, to learn and continuously improve, reaching higher.
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