May Apprentice of the Month - Easha Ahmed

We are happy to announce that the winner of LDN Apprentice of the Month is Easha @ SAGE Publishing!

Easha was nominated by her Skills Coach – Mati and the awesome feedback was provided by Easha’s line-manager and Global Head of Technology Governance and Innovation – David Barnard.

You can read the full nomination below!

Easha’s Skills Coach:

Easha has done well in what is a difficult time for all. Working well remotely, attending meetings, engaging via Slack and getting work done. Easha has been really consistent and doing well with her coursework. 

Easha’s line-manager:

Energy: 

Since starting with SAGE last year Easha has done well to handle the pace of change that is inherent in working as part of a small, agile team. As the governance function in which Easha works manages our security, compliance, risk and continuity, there was a significant impact from coronavirus. Easha continued to fully support the efforts of the team as we focused entirely on business continuity, escalating some of the projects Easha had been involved in to ensure the company could respond to the crisis.

Enthusiasm: 

Easha’s enthusiasm for the work we do has grown continually since joining SAGE. Easha has taken every opportunity to understand how technology and governance fits into the wider publishing business, providing a broader context for the work we are doing. Easha has also taken opportunities to work with and shadow other teams across SAGE, both in Technology and the publishing functions.

Willingness To Learn: 

I have been really impressed with Easha’s willingness and ability to learn new things. She is an incredibly fast and enthusiastic learner, whether the topic is related to the technical parts of IT, the roles across SAGE or detailed governance frameworks like COBIT. This enthusiasm has also meant that both me and my team have had to brush up on some of our knowledge to support Easha’s learning!

Ability To Take Feedback:

Easha demonstrates a willingness to receive feedback and guidance, a critical skill to anyone on a path of continuous learning. During some of Easha’s early projects there was a tendency to focus on speed over accuracy and together we focused on how to increase that attention to detail. Choosing accuracy over delivering something early was an important lesson and one Easha was happy to work on and improve.

Propensity To Take Action: 

Easha has demonstrated her ability to take action and manage her own work, particularly in the all areas of her apprenticeship work. We regularly discuss the deliverables for the apprenticeship program, and the work that entails beyond the activities of her day job with SAGE. Easha has taken personal responsibility to stay on top of this additional workload.

Easha has done an excellent job, adding real value, in the area of data visualisations for one of the teams key deliverables. Easha has evolved the reports from a simple excel table with minimal features, through to some excel graphs, and finally into a collection of visualisations that include multiple slices of the core dataset to focus attention on areas that require the most attention.

This has helped us to improve the quality of our business and technology continuity information, enabling us to quickly identify areas where improvements were needed to ensure continuity. This work began last year, before the coronavirus pandemic, and has Easha has continued to improve the visualisations as they became a critical requirement for us.

Congratulations Easha!