Bye bye education. Hello “real world”.

Student to graduate to employed 9-5er in London.

Matt Fairbrass Blog, General 9-5, clear books, income tax calculator, london, starting in business, work 2 Comments

I have been very fortunate to find myself in the small percentage of people who leave university with a job lined up after graduation, and this is partly down to having spent an extra year in my degree on an industry placement. I cannot stress more to anyone who is currently in further education or is considering going to university in the future, the importance of real professional experience in the industry you’re studying towards, as it is this alone which sets you aside from the thousands of other applicants who have just graduated. Graduating with a good degree is obviously important as well, but grades alone won’t guarantee you success in the “real world”, especially if you want to work for a major company on a high paying salary to substitute the “free money” from student loans, grants and overdrafts, which you have become so accustomed to.

Having said that it wasn’t a simple process by far, I applied for positions in a number of different companies (including Google, *cough* where was my application response?) with not much success. But one evening on the 24th February 2010 while I was sat at my computer working on an assignment for university, I saw my Mail app on my dock light up with one new message received. It was from Tim Fouracre, the managing director of a company called Clear Books. In his email he said that he had “some how stumbled upon my site and it had caught [his] eye.” He went on to explain that Clear Books were a growing start up and were looking for a “frontend and/or backend web developer (HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP, MySQL)”, and that I should check them out and drop them an e-mail if I were interested in coming in for an interview for the position. I must admit, it came as a bit of a shock first. The only job offer related e-mails my inbox usually received were the vast amount of spam e-mails sent from recruitment agencies, which often yielded little or no results.

On Monday 22nd March 2010, I traveled from Canterbury to London to interview for the position of senior developer / designer at Clear Books. Upon arrival I was met by Tim, and Nick Braithwaite (the sales and marketing manager at the time), who asked me if it would be ok if we conducted a less formal interview down at the local pub, as they had been cramped in a stuffy office all day conducting interviews with other applicants. From that point I knew that Clear Books was the kind of company I wanted to work for, not because of the pub part (well that may have influenced me), but because of the way they approached work; creative, open, and fun. Having these characteristics in a company gives me a lot of creative freedom in my role as a developer and designer. I accepted the offer from Clear Books, and started working for them on the 5th July 2010.

That was two months ago today, and during this short space of time I have achieved so much. I re-designed Income Tax Calculator, a tool as it’s name would imply; a calculator to work out your income tax. Designed and developed Starting in Business, a website for small/medium businesses and start ups to ask and answer business/accounting related questions to grow a help community. Developed the new theming feature (due for release soon), enabling our users to customise the look and feel of their invoices and quotes. Designed several marketing campaigns to help promote Clear Books.

All in all it has been a busy two months, but I have really enjoyed every minute of it. It’s a great feeling to wake up in the morning and think, “I get to go to work today. ”, rather than “I have to go to work today…. “. Clear Books is growing and I can see that it has a great future ahead, one of which I am excited to be a part of.

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