UK native Adrian Yorke works as a Senior Data Engineer in Wealth Management and the technical supervisor of Data Engineering teams that support the tribe's cloud transformation. Adrian also serves as a mentor in the Tech Academy's DevOps Tower and enjoys deep diving into IT topics in his free time.  At OP, he appreciates the extensive opportunities for competence development.  

Adrian Yorke serves as a mentor in the Tech Academy's DevOps Tower. Over the years, he has taught numerous study groups and helped students gain a deeper understanding of themes related to automated software development, testing and operations. 
An important teaching resource is the DevOps Handbook, which provides an extensive introduction into the main principles of DevOps.   

Adrian, who has previously worked in the Data Capabilities tribe of the Insurance segment, appreciates OP's way of encouraging employees to discover ways for lifelong learning and professional development. He believes that the focus of competence development is increasingly on individuals.    

"At OP, employees are heavily involved in the design and implementation of competence development methods. In my experience, people tend to stay on for longer in companies that let employees have a say in the way working methods are developed. The opportunity to create something new within the organisation is rewarding."    

Every day is a school day  

Adrian describes himself as an intellectually curious learner, with a learning style that could be defined as a "continuous discovery".   

"I work in software technology and study new phenomena of my own volition. Technology changes rapidly, and studying is necessary for keeping up with the pace of development. Every day is a school day, as we say in the UK. I study and pick up new technologies regularly in order to develop my work and methods. I also keep a detailed log of experiments, which is often helpful in my projects."  

Adrian also follows the latest phenomena in his field actively on social media.    

"In our most recent project, for example, we implemented a local Kafka transaction log that has proven to be incredibly useful. This particular engineering tip was found on LinkedIn of all places, so it's worth following social media also from the point of view of professional development."   

70:20:10 encourages professional development 

OP uses the 70:20:10 model of competence development. This means that 70% of time is used on daily tasks, 20% on improving the team's performance and the remaining 10% on learning new things. The model has been highly effective in Adrian's day-to-day work.   

"I use 20% of my time on improving existing applications or fine-tuning operative systems based on telemetry data. The 10% is for my own studying – that's right, even mentors need to study!"   

Mentoring reinforces the cycle of successful learning  

Adrian believes he has identified a common feature shared by the Tech Academy's mentors. 

"Mentors have what could be called a learning gene: we have positive experiences of learning and want to constantly develop our skills and knowledge further. Personally, I've learned to experiment more and communicate more closely with stakeholders.  

Lately, Adrian has participated in book clubs focused on different technology topics. One of them is currently reading the book "Fundamentals of Data Engineering" by Joe Reis & Matt Housley. Discussing the themes with a group has been an insightful experience.   

Adrian sees the Tech Academy as a multi-professional learning environment where it is easy to delve into new topics. He especially praises the Academy's people interactions. 

"Mentors instruct courses in weekly group meetings, which help students through discussion and critical thinking. Some courses are based on popular literature, others on OP's way of working and internal processes. We have weekly Q&A sessions and occasional presentations of final projects by graduating students. 

 We are living through a time of significant technological advances – everyone can benefit from AI tools  

Adrian, who is intellectually curious by nature, says that he enjoys exploring new phenomena also in his free time.  

"It's probably no surprise that I love learning new IT skills. Recently, I reassembled my main computer at home to run on Linux instead of Windows. I've also learned to "Dockerize" my Python apps to achieve better development capabilities and deployment workflow. Lately, I've been honing my skills in Azure Cloud, Databricks and Apache Spark, all of which are used in our Data Engineering solutions at OP. 

Adrian sees the Tech Academy's future as bright. He is confident that AI technologies and large language models in particular will feature strongly in the training offering.   

"We are living in a time of great technological advances. I would encourage everyone to make use of the new AI capabilities in their work. OP's internal AI chat has helped our team define test cases and speed up documentation. It has also made it easier to find technical solutions to most common coding problems. Still, a healthy amount of scepticism is needed, as current AI models make mistakes and have a tendency for hallucinations."