#Gradstories Matt Bartkowski, Associate Test Engineer, Glanbia

What does a typical week look like for you?

My day-to-day workload involves maintaining and updating our test suite which is a set of tests that run every day to check that every functionality in our company is working correctly so that in case anything happens we can catch it early and and get that fixed.

I also help other teams with their testing. If there's any new functionality or a new product that they're releasing they have to test everything before it goes live so I'll join them in the phase of testing so I can help them get the product or the project over the finish line.

What are the main skills you need to be successful in your role?

The first main skill that I think is most important is problem solving because there's a lot of issues that come up as you're working. You might have to go in a bit deeper and kind of figure it out from the bottom up. Another skill that I think is very important for this role is communication skills because we interact with everybody from the company so we often have to explain our test methodologies and how to conduct them properly.

What was your career break?

I studied computer science at UCD, in my final year I got an excellent chance to go on an exchange to china so I finished my college in Beijing and after I came back to Ireland, I didn't really know what to do. I was thinking of going into software engineering because that's what I was thinking of doing from the start of college yeah. So I found this excellent for a software engineer and I for it, I got a call back but they told me that they think that a test engineer role would be more suitable for me. I'm happy with this role, I think it is more suitable for me.

What do you love about your job?

What I really love about working at Glanbia is how big the company is and how many opportunities you get and how many different people you get to interact with in your day-to-day work. There's always something different to do so the projects may differ from from one day to the other vastly and so would the work you'll be doing. I'm never bored there's always something to do and there's many opportunities to just put yourself out there.

What advice would you have for students?

I think the most important skill you need to get into a role like this would be to learn to sell your work because often we focus on the final product. Even if it's a small project you can often talk a lot about it and how you got there and all the problems you've encountered how you how you got over those.

How have you adjusted to working from home?

When I started working for Bia, we were working from home. I got all the equipment sent to me. There was a lot of effort put into the onboarding process. The scary part was that I was away from everybody. I was afraid I would feel kind of left out but Glanbia was really great and they eased me into the job and I'm really comfortable now working from home.