As the Summer of Tech 2019 season draws to a close, we're excited to announce two new interns joining our team for the summer. We also reflect on the positive partnership between Spotlight Reporting and Summer of Tech and the impact it's made to student's lives, including that of our Quality Assurance Analyst, Yulia Tekin.

Our Spotlight Reporting team interacting with students at the Summer of Tech 'meet and greet' event in Wellington last month.

There’s quite a buzz in the office at Spotlight Reporting at this time of year, as we hear which new Summer of Tech interns will be joining us for the summer. Our company has been involved with the programme for a number of years and have appointed numerous interns from IT and Design to provide them with essential skills and work experience, to help students and graduates enter the New Zealand IT industry successfully.

Our own Spotlight Reporting success story

The partnership between Spotlight Reporting and Summer of Tech (SoT) has delivered some great success stories. Take our current Quality Assurance Analyst, Yulia Tekin – a SoT intern who started her journey with us in 2018.

Originally from Russia, Yulia, her husband and three children moved to New Zealand in 2017. After finishing her degree in Information Security in Moscow, she was freelancing while raising her young family. Once she arrived in New Zealand, she decided to put her degree to good use and jump back into IT. She enrolled herself into a one year IT graduate program at WelTec and signed up for the SoT programme shortly after.

“I was really impressed by the way SoT worked. We got a lot of help, starting from editing our CVs, to finishing with IT-oriented boot camps and job-interview training."

“I’m very appreciative of the opportunity SoT gave someone like me, who is restarting or even changing their career, to gain experience and learn while working in a real company.  Now I’m happy to be part of a real scrum team, in a small, cozy office – all with an ocean view too!”

SoT and Spotlight enabled Yulia to reignite her passion as a tester after being absent from the workforce due to her family responsibilities: “Having worked as a tester before having children, the program reignited my passion and took my knowledge to the next level, in terms of test automation development. My diploma project focused on API automation test suite, so I felt extremely lucky to be given an opportunity to be an intern at Spotlight Reporting and now appointed as a Quality Assurance Analyst.”

“I’m very appreciative of the opportunity SoT gave someone like me, who is restarting or even changing their career, to gain experience and learn while working in a real company.  Now I’m happy to be part of a real scrum team, in a small, cozy office – all with an ocean view too!”

It worked out so well the first time, we're doing it again!

We're excited to announce our new SoT interns are Poonamjeet Kaur (QA and Test Analyst intern) and Flynn Owen (AI and ML Research Internship). Congratulations!

Poonamjeet Kaur	Flynn Owen
QA and Test Analyst Internship	AI and ML Research Internship

Our Development Team Lead, Andrew Thompson is thrilled with the partnership. "Our ongoing involvement and support for the Summer of Tech initiative has led to a nomination for the WellingtonNZ Internationalisation Award. It recognises the contributions made by a workplace to the working and studying experience as well as the professional development of international students in the Wellington region." 

Cath Randall, Workforce Development Specialist for WellingtonNZ backs this up by saying: “Spotlight Reporting has been a great supporter of the SoT programme, showing that they value students and graduates and in particular have shown that they are prepared to take on international students which is what this award is about recognising and promoting.”