Ian W, Head of Platform (Infrastructure & Security), Cambridge

My career journey within Cambridge University Press & Assessment has run in parallel with the organisation’s technology journey. I first joined 12 years ago in what you might call conventional systems administration and operations work. Over time, I had the opportunity to work more closely with our development teams. I found that helping to build and run new products was a more creative and impactful use of my skillset.

At that point, I moved across to our Academic publishing group and switched my focus to directly supporting the organisation’s goal of distributing information and learning across the world. I was there from the start of the development of Cambridge Core, our primary publishing platform.

If you want to read an e-book or article we publish, you can view or download it online on Core. It looks like a website, but in fact it runs as a complex set of systems that interact behind the scenes. Digital content pipelines have to be managed so that the original text is converted to different forms and then it must be uploaded to our AWS cloud platform. There are fascinating challenges involved in running a world-class digital publishing platform - you need a high-functioning search engine, for example, when you host almost three million journal articles.

One of the most satisfying aspects of working here in technology is the democratic approach to engineering. I always feel comfortable that I can basically bring in anything I think has value to my peers and say “what do you think?”. Early on, I suggested that we automate everything – and the organisation took that idea on board and has stuck with it ever since.

The creation of our Engage product is the perfect illustration of the collaborative way we work in Technology. Engage is a preprint server, which allows academics to publish their papers online before peer review and official publication.

We set ourselves six months to build it. It was ultimately born out of a really fast, free flowing exchange of ideas with my peers. I can recall two afternoons of whiteboarding with a few of my colleagues as we drew out a concept, then had a passionate debate about the ins and outs. Then we backed away briefly, before returning to re-draw it, debate some more and come up with what we thought would work. It only took us three months to have it ready for testing - and it did indeed work as intended.

What this shows is that Technology at Cambridge is very much about the power of your working relationships and the trust between colleagues. I enjoy playing with the technology and I've got quite a lot of freedom to do that in my role. However, it is the personal relationships that drive me, and I know a lot of colleagues feel the same way.

We prefer lightweight processes, which means that different tech groups can essentially find their own best ways of working. I like the fact that Technology is an open, collegiate environment, without a strong sense of hierarchy. What you really notice is the intellectual curiosity of the people. This is the kind of place where you can end up in a conversation about something completely random and colleagues will have really interesting views on the most obscure subjects.

Adora O, Head of Security Operations, Manila

What I enjoy most about working here are the people, the culture, and the work-life balance. Cambridge has also given me the opportunity to really grow professionally. At the time I first joined, there was no central security team. I came on board with the understanding that I would be the person to develop the function.

The work began by maximising the use of the security tools we already had. From there, we built an understanding of how the security set-up could mature in daily use. My team protect the organisation’s workstations from viruses, malware and ransomware. There is always someone continuously monitoring our logs to maintain this endpoint protection. More recently, we have started to evolve beyond endpoint security to take on a wide scope of responsibility for protecting not just our colleagues, but also the organisation as a whole and our reputation.

Your ideas and inputs are heard and valued by senior management within Technology. One of the initiatives I am most proud of working on in IT security is what we call the skills booster programme for our new starters. In their first 30 days of joining us, everyone completes a security course that kickstarts their knowledge and their understanding of the language we commonly use in the security operation. This has been very successful because the whole team speaks in a technical language that everyone understands - there is common ground to work from.

Career development is one of the strongest reasons to join Cambridge University Press & Assessment. I have gained two new certifications in my time here. I am fortunate to have a manager who really encouraged me to achieve them. I just recently gained a very difficult certification for security, called CISSP. Everything was funded and supported by Cambridge. I was also given the time to study and prepare properly for the certification, which demonstrates the emphasis on work-life balance here.

At previous companies, there was very much a long-hours culture. It was all just work, work, work. At Cambridge there is always someone to tell you to stop, breathe and take a break. Any time you have a personal need, the organisation is very understanding and supportive. It has helped me balance how to be a parent and a career woman, and how to become a student again - the whole shebang. I also appreciated the opportunity to work from home. It was wonderful to be closer to nature during the pandemic - and team members still have the option to work from home under our hybrid working set up.

Darren S, Technology Director, English, Cambridge

In my career, I have always wanted to do challenging things and solve difficult problems. This is what I was brought in to do - to help change an organisation that was not previously particularly technical and was primarily focused on managing third parties. My focus is enabling my teams, and other teams in Technology, to be successful in supporting the overall business strategy and objectives.

So, that covers things from making sure we have sufficient budgets and enough of the right kind of resources to ensuring that my team have got the appropriate salary, and the right development plans. Helping other teams understand how to work with us, and vice versa is another important part of the job.

Our approach in Technology centres around actually asking customers what their problems are, and then delivering solutions that genuinely fix those problems. Crucially, we like to encourage solutions from within rather than top down. Colleagues have the freedom to choose the right solution for any given problem. Take our core platform in English - a virtual learning environment called Cambridge One. We knew that we needed to provide a better digital service to meet the emerging needs of our customers. But we weren't quite sure how we were going to do it. There was a lot of new stuff involved that we had never really had to deal with before.

Rather than spend two years working out what the solution should be, then trying to deliver something, we actually created a number of agile teams. The focus was on working with customers and with the business - collaborating together to find the answers to tricky questions and deliver value quickly. We used agile methodologies to deliver in small chunks, and deliver them quickly. It was a good thing we chose that approach, because COVID came along and, all of a sudden, everything went digital in the world of learning and education - and we were ready and prepared.

In terms of technology, we really are doing some of the most exciting technical projects in our industry. We are using artificial intelligence (AI) in many areas. We've used it for speech dialogue, so that you can speak to a computer as if you're having a conversation. It will tell you how well you're doing and where you've gone wrong.. Through AI, you can rely on a marking machine to deliver results fast with accuracy and consistency, and at scale.

Another interesting field is developing really engaging games for young children. We've got some great videos of kids just absolutely loving playing our games, and getting truly involved. It is hugely satisfying to get feedback from teachers on how much their classes get out of these games.

It's always good to understand that what you're doing at work actually has meaning. What I'm doing is giving life opportunities to young people who either themselves, or their parents, want to have a better life. Satisfaction comes from knowing that you are changing people's lives through the products and services you're providing.

Joanna G, Head of Business Architecture and Strategic Alignment Cambridge

I first joined Cambridge University Press & Assessment in 2013 as business relationship and demand manager, with responsibility for setting up a new team to manage the technology pipeline portfolio, developing the IT strategic plan and pipeline governance.

Later, I was asked by the Chief Information Officer to create a new function focusing on business architecture and strategic alignment. Among the first things we did was to introduce capability and technology road-mapping, allowing us to retire outdated legacy technologies and identify synergies across the technology estate.

Now, I head up a team of business architects based in Cambridge and have been building on our activity as part of the wider Architecture and Direction team. We’re a dynamic team that has an incredibly varied and interesting role where no two days are the same. The role often involves working with product teams, strategy, organisation change, digital operating models and portfolio shaping, as well as technology.

Part of what makes my job so incredibly interesting are the huge challenges and opportunities in the education sector globally, particularly around digital - we saw this with education during the Covid pandemic and since then, with artificial intelligence. Institutions, teachers and learners are moving to digital learning and assessment formats as well as blended and hybrid ways of doing things. The expectation of young people everywhere is of course that digital is part of the experience, and exams are no exception.

As an organisation, we are working to meet needs and expectations while ensuring high-quality, valid educational outcomes. This is crucial as our exams are often high stakes and enable a learner’s future opportunities. As far as technology is concerned, we’re innovating where the stakes are very high, and we have a lot of high-pressure, high-volume exams to deliver every single year. It's a cliché to say that you're changing the wheels on the bus while the bus is moving, but that is exactly what we're doing.

Over the nine years I’ve been here, it has been both a journey of personal and career growth, and one of seeing the organisation I work for totally change over time.

Cambridge is a truly global organisation made up of people in different regions across the world, but what my colleagues all have in common is a sense of purpose and mission to make a difference in education, which is such a positive motivation for us all.