School:

Recently i finished my GCSE exams for school, and finished school on a whole. I didn't really want to continue down the education route, so I decided to start working instead. I am extremely lucky with this opportunity as my Dad (Simon) runs Simon Antony Ltd, a well respected Umbraco Agency, which is partly why I found an interest in it I guess, but this allowed me to start working with him pretty much full time almost right after leaving school.

Work:

On my first day I was nervous, as anyone starting a new job would be, however I was working for my dad, so I had the nervousness of a new job, and the pressure to prove myself to him, as this has been his life for a very very long time. I started on Tuesday the 1st of July, 2025, and sat down in the office getting settled in. The first thing I was tasked with is logging into a range of our client websites / apps that we use pretty much on a day to day basis. Coding apps, communication tools, business websites, etc.

The next day I was shown Paul Seal on YouTube, and I started working through his umbraco 13 guide. I'm on episode 6 now, and his videos have helped me immensely, so much so that I have already helped with clients umbraco sites with comfort, of course it took a few minutes to register everything but I was a lot more comfortable with it than I thought I'd be.

Certifications:

In my first few days, I undertook some courses through coursera,  the "Introduction to HTML" and "HTML for Beginners: Working with Images" are the 2 courses I've taken so far, and they have helped me indefinitely. Coursera has a feature where you can get certificates from their courses, so I have added them both on my LinkedIn profile , and it looks much better, though more will be added as I learn more skills.

I aim to become a certified umbraco master, however this would be very costly and will take some months to get to the level needed. This is my main objective right now because it will help clients gain more confidence in my abilities and allow me to understand my tasks in a more rounded way.

I'm still not aware of what i got in my school results, but I took Computer Science, Business studies, Engineering and Outdoor ED. For computer science and business studies, I was projected high Bs for both of them, and I feel as though I will reach that goal as the exams were fairly comfortable, hard of course, but comfortably hard. I will receive my results in August so I will probably update this post when i do.

Summary:

Overall, I'm hoping that this year will be a great starting year as it has so far, and I'm even receiving help from Dean Leigh later on with umbootstrap which will be great. I can't wait to learn more about this side of the world and to become a "true asset" to the business in the future.