“The biggest thing that attracted me to working at Planit was the fact that it was a consultancy, which enabled me to work at different client sites. Planit certainly delivered on that promise, as I consulted for telecommunications, banking, wealth management, and utilities clients in just the first three years with the company.”
Rachel Whitney, Test Consultant, Planit

After Rachel Whitney graduated from university, she secured a graduate job as a software developer working for the local electricity company. But with many of her university friends taking time off to traveling the world before starting their careers, Rachel felt wanted to do the same and applied for a working holiday visa to go backpacking in Australia.

After backpacking down the east coast of Australia in a campervan with two university friends, Rachel arrived in Sydney just before the turn of the millennium and the start of the Sydney Olympic games. “I applied for jobs in Sydney and landed a great job doing something I had never before, which was testing slot machines,” she said.

The job lasted for several years and Rachel decided that Australia was the place she wanted to be, so she applied for skilled migration and became an Australian citizen. The job was also where she met Leanne Howard, before she joined Planit and became an Agile Practices Consultant.

“Near the end of my first job in Sydney, I realised that if testing is my career I should get some form of certification, and that’s when I found out about Planit was running ISTQB foundation courses,” Rachel says. “It was at this time I discovered Leanne now worked for Planit, who suggested I apply to work with the company, as it was growing rapidly and needed skilled people.”

With that, Rachel became Planit employee number 80 at the Sydney office.

“The biggest thing that attracted me to working at Planit was the fact that it was a consultancy, which enabled me to work at different client sites,” she says. “Planit certainly delivered on that promise, as I consulted for telecommunications, banking, wealth management, and utilities clients in just the first three years with the company.”

Another big draw card for Rachel was the opportunity to work as a trainer delivering testing courses, which is something she had long aspired to do. “I remember being very nervous for my first ISTQB Foundation course, where I stood in front of a class full of people wanting to learn, but I soon relaxed into and got hooked on training people,” she says.

Over the years with Planit, Rachel has clocked up many air miles running training courses all over Australia and New Zealand. She has also, as a Test Consultant, helped create some of the courses and still enjoys training people even after a decade of doing it.

When Planit opened its Reading, Berkshire branch in 2014, Rachel saw this as an opportunity to go back to the UK. “By this time, I was married and had two girls, and having my English family on the other side of the world and not involved in their childhood was hard, so I jumped at the opportunity to come over while my kids were young,” she said.

Planit was happy to make use of Rachel’s testing and training expertise in the UK, so she became employee number two in the Reading office. Since joining the branch, Rachel has run the last five bootcamps that have bought in many new recruits and she has run training courses as far and wide as France, Spain and Turkey.

“Training fellow employees motivates me, and I often tell new starters anything is possible when working with Planit” she says. “You can go anywhere you like with your career in testing as long as you put in the effort to achieve it.”