CTG At Work: Peter D.

Company title: Test Consultant

Years at CTG: 5 Years

Hometown: Hasselt, Belgium

Current city: Brussels, Belgium

Favorite thing to do outside of work: PC gaming, cooking, reading, and exploring the world.

Favorite song right now: “Insane” by Korn

My alarm is set for 8:03 a.m., but the display shows 7:59 a.m. I usually wake up a few minutes earlier, just in time to switch it off before the noise wakes up my girlfriend. I slip out of bed and into the shower, check the weather outside, and after a quick oatmeal and fruit breakfast, I head off to work.

It’s a 20 to 25-minute walk to the client buildings (they have four of them within walking distance of each other) and depending on the nice Belgian weather, I arrive at my team space in either a presentable condition or looking like a wet dog, which is, for some reason, still funny to the not-so-wet people. With the right clothing, it’s a nice morning exercise that clears my head, and I don’t have to go through the find-a-parking-spot-in-Brussels battle.

The teams I am coaching are going through a big Agile transformation, so my daily schedule starts with joining them for their daily stand-ups, planning meetings, demos, retrospectives, or any other morning activity they have planned to stay up to date with their current progress and offering coaching support. Changing the way you work is a lot about experimenting, ideas, and questions. As an Agile consultant, being available as a sounding board to share previous experiences or simply as a facilitator is a big part of the job. This makes my personal agenda a bit unpredictable, but it’s always fun and different.

I either have lunch at my desk, checking client and CTG emails, or grab a bite to eat with my fellow coaches in one of the many small restaurants in the city center. The afternoon is a mix of going back to the teams, running training sessions, facilitating workshops, or discussing coaching targets and roadmaps. This information smoothly finds a way back to CTG so we can anticipate future requests and have a well-prepared proposal set up.

After 5 p.m., work within the teams slows down significantly and I head back to my desk to catch up with the other coaches. This is where we talk about the day—about the good, the bad, and the ugly—help each other out, sometimes vent a bit, and come up with ideas to tackle the many challenges ahead.

On the way home, I usually swing by the local grocery store to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables for dinner and the next breakfast. The walk back is also a great time to clear my head and get rid of any frustrations or a bad mood. I arrive back home around 6:30 p.m. calm, happy, and ready to enjoy the evening. My girlfriend and I cook a light dinner, although sometimes it is made less light because we really enjoy a good dark Belgian beer or her Indonesian home cooking. I’m very fortunate that she likes watching really “weird” (to me at least) Japanese cartoons, which gives me plenty of time to feed my gaming hobby. I remember my mom hoping this would pass “soon” when I was about 11 years old and spent too much time behind my flashy C64. Evening are also spent reading or studying new material, watching a movie together, baking cakes, or simply talking about the fun things we experienced during the day.

Working for CTG is a very conscious choice for me. As a company, it reflects the importance I put on learning and growing in both my professional and personal life. It has not been a continuous journey together. I love to chase my dreams and tackle specific challenges I’ve never faced before. Sometimes, these dreams take me away from CTG and into some of the biggest and most fun game companies I respect and admire (I am a game geek after all). Coming back home to Belgium meant coming back to CTG. No other company that I know creates an equal feeling of belonging. It is a place where you recognize the care for people and profession, where living our values actually means something, and where your new experiences are not only welcomed, but also put to use in building an even better CTG and client experience. Simply put, CTG means fun, motivation, happiness, and challenge.