Meet The Consultants

My name is Anne Raaijman. I am working on my thirtieth lap around the sun and work at Xillio as a Migration Consultant and Project Manager. Before starting my job at Xillio I had never considered working in IT and have always loved working with people. I worked as a teacher, an entrepreneur, and a project manager in different countries and cultures. I really enjoy listening to and producing music in my free time, and with my background in philosophy and linguistics, I always loved exploring new cultures and being close to people. When the world was struck by a serious pandemic all that human contact decreased to a trickle of its former glory and I wanted to reconsider what I was doing. I decided to reschool myself and learn coding, which is a decision that was hard to make, but once I got started learning I knew I had made a great choice.

Learning to code in JavaScript was like learning a new language, speaking to computers instead of people. Computers are a lot pickier than humans, so you have to really pick your words, which makes it a bit more of a puzzle than human languages. This was a great new challenge that I enjoyed a lot for the first few months. However, I started to get worried that in coding professionally, I would not be able to employ my experience in working with people, which I have always really enjoyed. Enter Xillio.

As a migration consultant at Xillio I was able to combine my newly found joy in talking with computers and working with people and all the dynamics they bring to any situation. My first few months at Xillio were really about finding what I wanted to do in the company. Although I was hired as a technical consultant, it is really up to you to find out how much you want to be focusing on talking to computers or dealing with clients. Some of my colleagues fully focus on the more technical parts of our projects: writing scripts for extracting data, transforming data, loading data, making reports, and so on. They’ll still have to interact with the clients they are working for but that’s usually more focused on ironing out technical details to make sure our scripts do exactly what the client wants. Other colleagues fully focus on everything project related. Talking to clients at length to make sure we understand exactly what they are expecting, and how we can deliver in a way that makes them happy. If our project manager understands what a client needs, we can really direct our technical consultants in the right direction. These projects tend to work best. Alignment, alignment, alignment.

I chose to take a 50/50 approach. I work on some projects as the project manager. This means I support my technical consultants and make sure they have everything they need to do their job, but also that I take my time to understand what the client wants exactly (this is less straightforward than you or even the client may think). On other projects, I am a technical consultant working on our scripting and making sure that we do the work the client has hired us to do.

The fact that I can do both is really a blessing for me. I get to keep developing my coding skills, and learning more about content management while on the other hand, I get to work with people, balancing two things I love doing. My days usually start with client meetings in the mornings. Depending on which stage in the project we are these talks are initiating, finding what we can mean to the client, or if we are further along in the project, the technical consultants will join, and we dig into the subject matter. I take a break around lunchtime and usually go for a walk or, if time permits, might go for a run or do some sports. In the afternoon I’ll be more focused on working on code, trying to see if our connectors fit the clients' source systems or see how we can transform the metadata to fit the target system. I usually close off the day with some coursework, which is encouraged and supported by my team. I take courses online. At the moment I’m taking a project management course by Google and working through a node.js course on one of the big online course websites, which is going to be great for my resume.