Fujitsu
Reece Flaherty, Digital Technology Solutions Professional Graduate
Transforming futures: achieving personal and professional dreams with degree apprenticeships
Meet Reece Flaherty, a Digital and Technology Solutions alumna who had his personal life changed due to his degree apprenticeship. While on the program, he was able to buy his first home at 21, secure a promotion to a leadership role, and establish a new UX team within his workplace, thereby fostering positive change for his employer.
Read more about his apprenticeship experience and discover the benefits the program can bring to both employers and employees.
Achieving personal goals through an apprenticeship
I’m really proud of my achievements on the Digital and Technology Solutions Professional Degree Apprenticeship – being the first in my family (alongside my sister) to attend university, buying my own home at 21, establishing a new UX team, and graduating with a First.
Through the degree apprenticeship, I’ve matured, accelerated my career, travelled widely, and achieved financial and educational goals my teenage self could never have dreamed of.
As a teenager, I fell in with the wrong crowd – I even ended up suspended from school. I could have gone down the wrong path very easily. I also knew that full time university wasn’t the right choice for me. But I found the degree apprenticeship and joined Fujitsu as an apprentice software developer, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it saved my life.
Career progression in the programme
Within three months of starting my apprenticeship at Fujitsu, I very quickly noticed that there was more I could be doing in the design space for my team. I put a business case to my line manager outlining the benefits of creating a UX/UI role, and he supported me to move forward with the role.
The following year, we had a new core cohort of apprentices and graduates come into the team, and I mentored three or four people from that cohort. The year after that, I did the same thing with the next cohort.
It became a 2-3 year process of mentoring and building a UX team, putting in training pathways, and bidding for and acquiring new work.
Then just before I finished my degree apprenticeship, I connected with some people in the organisation that were really interested in rolling the UX team out to the wider business, and we put together an official business case to the heads of the UK arm of Fujitsu, which was approved.
We’ve now grown the team to thirteen people, brought in senior experts and rolled our services out to the wider business. I secured a promotion to UX Lead and a substantial pay-rise.
Securing a future as a digital professional
I genuinely don’t think I could have progressed this far and this quickly in my career if it hadn’t been for the degree apprenticeship. The IT Consultancy pathway allowed me not just to learn technical coding and user experience skills, but it also taught me a variety of other business topics that have really helped me as I’ve grown into this leadership position. As a leader, I’m not necessarily delivering for a customer all the time, but instead, I’m thinking strategically about how we get from here to there. University has taught me strategic thinking, and it’s allowed me to push myself to where I am today.
I’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit, and I’m always looking for things that I can do differently or where something might be missing, and I’m looking to improve all the time. And I think it was just quite natural for me coming from a design background and a coding background to notice that opportunity where others might not have been able to.
But it was the degree apprenticeship that gave me the knowledge and skills to put that into practice, the confidence to approach Fujitsu and build my business cases, and the ability to build a successful UX team from a standing start.