Adam Shepherd

'In the infrastructure consulting team, we all specialise in a particular area of the infrastructure. For example, my personal specialism is desktops and the Windows client.'

‘In terms of progression, if I say to my manager, “I want to be in such-and-such a role in five years’ time,” even though they know they’ll be losing one of their team for doing it, they’ll totally support me all the way and tell that we both need to sit down and put together a plan so that I can do that. It’s very much let’s go and figure out how we can help you get to that position that you want to be in.'

'One of the key things Microsoft is great at is obviously the training element – it’s not necessarily formal training all the time; there’s a lot of “silent” training that goes on. What I mean by “silent” training is that there’s a huge technical community within Microsoft; we have these distribution lists where people send emails out to a big group of people so that they can get technical answers back.'

'From a more structured point of view, we have conferences that we can go to throughout the year. One major conference that we go to is an internal conference where we get all the people from the product groups and so on who come and actually deliver sessions. It’s quite unlike any company I’ve ever seen in that the actual campus at Thames Valley Park is much like a university campus. It’s very relaxed, very informal, it makes doing business with the customers really easy.'

'And the people here are amazing – they’re all super-intelligent and very enthusiastic. I’ve not met one person here so far who doesn’t enjoy their job. Just from a social perspective and a sporting perspective, there are so many clubs you can join if you’re interested in sports, and Microsoft will help fund them.'

'There’s a bit of a bad reputation about Microsoft - I’ve heard from people outside who see it as this kind of big, evil empire, but that’s not true. We’re a business, obviously, and we’re out to compete with everyone else in the marketplace, just like any other business, but we’re also a great company in terms of the things we do and the community and the people we support.'