Same story, different companies

I’ve recently had the chance to deliver presentations in the offices of a couple of different companies. Both of these opportunities arose out of the work I’ve been doing with Paul Seaman in running software testing training for young adults on the autism spectrum through EPIC Recruit Assist and our programme, the EPIC TestAbility Academy (ETA).

Having delivered a presentation about ETA at the Melbourne LAST conference, one of the audience members from our talk – Darko Zoroja – reached out to us to see if we’d be willing to deliver the same talk again, this time at his workplace, Seek. Both Paul and I are keen to spread the ETA message as much as we’re able so we immediately said yes and were soon heading along St Kilda Road to Seek’s headquarters to meet Darko. Running the ETA presentation as a “brown bag” over lunch worked well, with a good crowd in the big open kitchen/lunch/presentation space gathering to hear our talk. We got a lot of thoughtful questions from this audience too and some interest was shown in EPIC and ETA (and maybe we even found a candidate for the next run of ETA as well). Thanks to Darko and everyone we met at Seek for their warm hospitality and excellent presentation facilities – and for giving up lunch breaks to listen to Paul and I !

The next opportunity came thanks to Paul’s employer, Travelport Locomote, so it was another trip down St Kilda Road to give the ETA presentation again, this time as a “lunch and learn” session in their open space (which comes handily equipped with an incredibly distracting wide view over Albert Park lake and Port Phillip Bay). It was a small but engaged bunch of Paul’s colleagues and there were some great questions at the end as well as another offer of assistance in running future ETA sessions. Thanks to this group also for giving up their lunch hour to spend listening to us telling our story.

A big “Thanks” to everyone who’s already shown interest in what we’re doing with EPIC and, of course, to my mate Paul without whose grit and determination in finding an organization to get this thing off the ground we’d have no story to tell.

If your organization has a genuine interest in diversity and would be keen to find out more about the EPIC TestAbility Academy, we’d be more than happy to give our talk on your premises too so just reach out if that’s of interest.