Careers for Maths and Physics graduates - Enable

In January this year, Enable sent three developers to attend NDC London. Since its start-up in Oslo 2008, the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) has become one of the largest conferences for .NET & Agile development with events held in London, Oslo, and most recently Sydney. With Enable primarily developing solutions using .NET, and with the conference boasting several .NET MVP speakers, the conference is a great fit for us.

Technical conferences such as this one can be extremely valuable for training and insight. They also give our developers the opportunity to get out of the office and meet with other developers, as well as the experts working on the technology we use day-to-day. While not all the talks in the agenda will yield gold, there will always be those few that positively impact the work we are developing today and some that will steer what we do tomorrow.

On Saturday 8th December 2018, Enable employees and their partners celebrated another year of success and innovation at the RSC’s The Other Place for our annual Christmas Party!

Christmas parties have become increasingly popular for companies over the years, with the huge appeal giving employees the opportunity to bond and help people from other departments get to know each other a lot better. These types of get-togethers are also an excellent chance to give our exceptionally loyal and motivated employees recognition for the hard work that they are doing and rewarding them for it. Retention is something that Enable prides itself on as we expect to grow to over 100 employees by 2020.

Following another successful year, Enable is proud and excited to announce details of our new office — Unit 15. The newly refurbished office is fully air-conditioned, and all employees are provided with high specification Apple Macs with dual monitors and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.

Founded in 2000, by entrepreneurs Denys Shortt OBE and Andrew Butt, Enable are the outsourced partner of choice for clients who wish to invest in continuous improvement through iterative development of their software products and business systems.

From our humble beginnings in a stable block, our team has grown to 75 people, half of whom are in technical software development roles. Our ambition is to double in size by 2020.

Our mission is to provide a vibrant and diverse working environment where everything we do, how we do it, and why we do it is rooted in two concepts: freedom and focus. Our employees have the freedom to work creatively, while our team structure and project processes allow them to focus entirely on solving any given challenge.

Why Stratford-upon-Avon?

We have made our home in Stratford-upon-Avon at the heart of Warwickshire, which was recently voted the 10th best place to live in the UK in an Office for National Statistics personal wellbeing survey. Close to the M40, Stratford-upon-Avon offers a direct rail line to Birmingham that runs every hour, making it an ideal location for anyone wishing to regularly commute from the city centre.

Over the past 17 years, Enable has forged strong relationships with some of the finest universities, bringing in the brightest students that they have to offer — with 79% of our analysts and developers graduating from one of the top 25 featured in the Times 2018 UK rankings! We regularly hold recruitment events and have formed close ties to the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham. This gives us the opportunity to engage and network with students, whist giving them a real insight into our company.

We particularly focus our recruitment on high achievers in numerate subjects, with 66% of our employees holding an undergraduate degree in either Maths or Science, and 41% attaining a Masters or PhD in their chosen field of study. This provides us with exceptional employees who not only possess outstanding technical skills, but also the ability to translate that knowledge into highly effective business solutions.

Geoff graduated from the University of Warwick in 2014 with an MEng in Computer Science before joining Enable as a Business Analyst. Geoff began his career at Enable working alongside our existing experienced analysts to uncover, discuss and challenge our clients’ requirements, and then document those requirements in the form of a comprehensive specification. Geoff offers his thoughts on his experience as a Business Analyst at Enable so far.

Over the past 17 years, Enable has forged strong relationships with some of the finest universities, bringing in the brightest students that they have to offer — with 79% of our analysts and developers graduating from one of the top 25 featured in the Times 2018 UK rankings! We regularly hold recruitment events and have formed close ties to the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham. This gives us the opportunity to engage and network with students, whist giving them a real insight into our company.

We particularly focus our recruitment on high achievers in numerate subjects, with 66% of our employees holding an undergraduate degree in either Maths or Science, and 41% attaining a Masters or PhD in their chosen field of study. This provides us with exceptional employees who not only possess outstanding technical skills, but also the ability to translate that knowledge into highly effective business solutions.

Recent starter Klaudija graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in Discrete Mathematics before joining Enable as a graduate software developer. Klaudija has begun her career at Enable with scheduled self-paced learning time to cover our methodology and the broad range of technologies that we support before contributing to project work. Once a graduate is deemed to have sufficient knowledge and experience they are promoted, typically after just one year. Klaudija offers her thoughts on her experience as a graduate software developer at Enable so far.

Workplace happiness isn’t just about competitive pay and benefits. Increasingly, more people are placing a higher value on wellbeing and working conditions, where flexibility, career progression and team bonding are an integral part of the company culture. By investing the time and effort into understanding what makes our people happy at work improves both the general mood of each individual member of staff and over all morale. This investment in a positive culture helps individuals to feel like an integral part of our company who are also willing to invest in it.

One of Enable’s top priorities is to provide a positive environment for all of our employees to work in. We operate a social group of volunteers whose objective is to organise various social and charitable events for all staff members. These include large annual events such as the Christmas and summer parties, as well as smaller events such as quiz nights, meals out, video and board games and sporting activities such as five-a-side football. A huge appeal of these social events is that it gives our employees the opportunity to bond and take part in activities they might not otherwise have considered or have found the time to take up themselves.

Let’s dive in to the 5 key social events that Enable organises to keep morale high and our employees productive.

Stratford-upon-Avon based software developer Enable has closed another record year in 2016 by sustaining double digit growth.

Sales for 2016 increased to more than £3.15m, up from £2.65m the previous year which represents an increase of 18.6% — more than £500,000. Licensing and implementing Enable’s new DealTrack software product was responsible for a significant portion of the growth.

During the year the company also welcomed 7 new starters on-board, taking the total headcount to 44 staff.

Co-founder and MD Andrew Butt comments:

“In 2017 with DealTrack and Enable iD we hope to pass through the £4m milestone.”

“We are receiving significant interest in our products and services from both UK and USA and are investing heavily in product development to make sure we are providing innovative software to our existing clients as well as attracting more new business.”

“We are also continuing to work closely with University of Warwick and plan to recruit many more graduates this year to help meet current and expected future demand.”