A Road Less Travelled: From Cars to Quality Assurance

With back to school season upon us, and exam results behind we see out our series on the career paths of the PlotBox team with PlotBox Senior QA Engineer Nathan Manson, who has gone from cars to quality assurance.

When you were 16 what did you want to be? 

When I was 16 years old and doing my GCSE’s I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I had an interest in cars.

Tell us about what you studied and when - or did you learn on the job ? 

When I left school I did a four year City and Guilds apprenticeship as a Light Vehicle Technician at Transport Training Services (TTS) at Nutts Corner. This was a mix of classroom and on the job training. Most of my time was spent with BMW & Mini, but I also worked for Vauxhall, Ford and Mazada. 

The recession hit and I was made redundant about a year after coming out of my apprenticeship. This made it hard to get a job as a mechanic as there were a lot of others in the same position with a lot more experience than me. 

I then ended up in warehouse and distribution. At the time I was glad to have a job, but it was meant as a stepping stone until I found another job as a mechanic. I was in warehousing for three years when I decided I needed to do something else.

I had three full time job interviews in one week. Before I went into the first interview, I made myself a deal. If I wasn’t successful in getting one of these three jobs I was going to stop looking for a full time job and take another look at education. 

I wasn’t successful in getting any offers from the three jobs. I then looked at several courses at tech and university, but with no A-Levels, my options were limited for university.

How has your career path been different to what you thought it would be? 

I didn’t want to do an Access course, as if something had happened and I couldn’t go on to university, the access course alone would not get me a job.

So at 26 I went back to tech at the Northern Regional College (NRC) in Newtownabbey to study an Extend Diploma in Applied Science (Forensics).

After 2 years I completed the course with 3 D*, which was equivalent to 3 A*s at A-Level. I then decided to continue my journey in education and went to the University of Ulster Jordanstown (UUJ) to study Biomedical Engineering. I graduated with First Class Honours at 32. 

What is your job now and how did you arrive here? 

Being a little bit older with responsibilities, I did not have the luxury of waiting for an offer for a job that I really wanted. Instead I took a role that I had never heard of before - ‘System Test Engineer’.

This included hardware and firmware elements of testing. As it turned out I had a knack for testing things, which likely came from my time spent as a car mechanic. The experience I gained in this role testing firmware, gave me the experience to apply for software based testing roles.

This is how I came to PlotBox. 

What have your main responsibilities been?

I joined PlotBox in 2021 as a QA Engineer (which was a role I had never considered with a Biomedical Engineering degree). My main responsibilities were manual testing of the software (finding what the developer had broken). But I also gained some experience as a ‘scrum master’ and in test automation scripting.

After 10 months I was given the opportunity to be Interim QA Lead. I was QA lead for 13 months, gaining experience leading the QA team, running QA resourcing, managing the release and continuing to manually test the software. After my tenure as QA Lead, I was promoted to Senior QA Engineer, which is where I am now. 

What has your overall experience at PlotBox been like? 

My experience at PlotBox has been nothing but positive. I have been given opportunities to learn and grow in my career, gain new skills and climb the career ladder - they genuinely want to grow talent from within where possible.

What would you say to your 16-year-old self? 

To my 16-year-old self - I would remind them it is not about finding a job that you love 100% of the time, because unless you are very fortunate this is unlikely to happen.

The key is to find something you are interested in, can see a future in and that you do not hate 100% of the time. 

Would you like to be part of our amazing team? Check out our open jobs here.