Working at Innovatia

From July 2003 until August 2008, I worked at Innovatia, which was a subsidiary of Bell Aliant. Innovatia does a lot of work outsourced by other companies in the areas of tech support, sales, documentation, etc. My various responsibilities in my time there primarily included software development, although I was involved in reporting and web site maintenance for a while as well.

My work with Innovatia began after I applied for a job there through the Youth Apprenticeship program (YAP). This program offers high school students the opportunity to work in positions normally reserved for university students or people with degrees. They train you with various skills that are highly sought after by employers.

After I graduated from YAP in 2004, I was given a certificate to present to my supervisor, Fam Loutfi. I arranged to do this a meeting attended by many of the company's executives. I was very appreciative of how Fam found time in her busy schedule to actually attend my YAP graduation. She was definitely not disappointed, as I was named the recipient of the Gregory Forbes Memorial Award that night.

I worked full-time during the summers since 2003, and I even worked part-time for the rest of the year. I was very fortunate in the way that Innovatia has been very good at accomodating my school schedule with flexible hours.

In the summer of 2005, I worked with another team on another floor within Innovatia. I was responsible for doing reporting work for Amanda London (shown in the picture below), freeing her up to implement some other projects. It was during the summer that I worked more closely with Paul Saulnier.

Okay, I bet I just lost you now. No, I didn't do any soul seeking or stuff like that. I met another guy with the same name as me! You can only imagine the confusion in our daily lives. We often sat next to each other in meetings, and had laughs everyday about how our coworkers would struggle to communicate with the Paul Saulnier they were looking for. When the other Paul began work at Innovatia, the tech team disconnected my access because they didn't realize there were two of us, and thought I was moving to another location.

The summer ended with an excellent send-off for me with a few gifts to forever remind me of the fun summer. There were a couple fake cigarettes to remind me of Amanda's smoke breaks, a toy boat to remind me of the boat ride at the team event in Fredericton, as well as two huge packages of Ganong candies since I always seemed to have a stockpile of them in my desk.

I continued to work at Innovatia as a software developer until August 2008. At this time, I left Innovatia to pursue my Masters in Computer Science at the University of Calgary.