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I joined NCS Singapore as an associate, application consultant soon after I graduated from Polytechnic. It was my first job. I stayed there for 5 years and was promoted twice to senior, application consultant, and I have left since then. This blog is about my experience working at NCS.
I am writing this blog for you fresh grads who are thinking of joining a SI firm and not sure what to expect. Hopefully this blog will ease some of your anxiety.
I will write based on what I experienced as an application consultant. This article is written from my subjective views and should be not viewed as the objective truth. Please take what I write here with a grain of salt.
Job scope
There are generally 2 type of work you will do there.
- Development
- Maintenance
If you are in a development team, you will be working on new projects for clients. You will attend meetings to understand the scope and business requirements for the project. There will (probably) be an architect in the team to deal with infrastructure design. As an application consultant, you just need to focus on the business requirements. There are costs associated if you get them wrong, so be sure to take notes during meetings and send meeting minutes to users so they can vet the requirements officially.
Doing development is highly rewarding, but stressful work. I spent much overtime during development work. But the rewards are good too. There is a high chance you will get a good bonus, pay raise, and promotion.
If you are in a maintenance team, you will be taking care of existing projects that are already rolled out/ in production. You will spend most of your time answering user questions, doing data patches, and thinking about ways to improve the stability of the application. From time to time there will be change requests by users, and you will be doing work similar to development. You would be attending meetings to firm up requirement, develop the new feature, test it with user, and roll it out to production.
Maintenance work is stable. You won’t need to overtime as much, if at all. You can spend your free time developing yourself or take up training. The rewards won’t be as good as development but it’s fair in my opinion.
Mentorship
There is no official mentor role in NCS, but there will most likely be someone there to guide you through your job. Either seniors in your team or your team lead. I was lucky to be assigned under a technically inclined tech lead. He actively leads design discussions and owns the codebase. I learned a lot from him.
If you are like me, lucky enough to work with architects, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Architects love to share their design thinking and it’s something you want to learn as soon as possible, enabling you to design end-to-end solution.
Work-Life Balance
Very different across teams. Some people can leave at 6 PM sharp every day, some had to do overtime every day. It really depends on your luck here. But this situation is not exclusive to NCS. Many companies in Singapore have the same problem.
Many useful training programs
One of the many benefits of working at NCS is there are a lot of training opportunities. I suggest you sign up for training that can benefit your career goals. You might think that you don’t have time for training. Trust me, your BAU work will never finish, take a break from BAU and level up yourself.
Some notable trainings I got was:
- Adobe Experience Manager
- Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect
- Agile Scrum Master (PSM I)
- many more
Classic Office Setting
Everyone gets a cubicle at NCS Hub. Except if you are deployed to the client-side, your desk might be freed up for others. The building also has some meeting rooms you can book for team discussion. Other than that, there’s a pantry with ice and hot water. No free snacks if you are looking for those.
In short…
I was lucky to be under a great team lead and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there at NCS. I eventually had to quit looking for more complex projects to learn more, but working at NCS gave me a solid foundation to work on from thereon. If you are like me, and just starting out at NCS, my advice to you is to take up the initiative and own the codebase. Learn everything you can from the existing codebase and don’t be afraid to ask why are things done in a certain way. There is a lot of opportunity to learn at NCS, as long as you are keen.
Have any questions? Drop a comment below, I’ll be sure to reply.
