Amy Newton’s route into the Manchester tech scene, as well as her own experiences along the way, has shaped her vision to improve the industry.
An integral part of the tech recruitment scene, Amy is on the Digital City Festival steering panel. For more information about the festival, click here.
“I dropped out of university because my mental health was a mess. I had just broken up with my boyfriend, I was living on cold baked beans in this awful house in North Manchester. I was 20 years old and I was topping up my electric meter with five pence pieces. I had no money. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” she tells me.
After a friend suggested she looked at recruitment, Amy managed to blag her way into a role recruiting for software testers – something she admits she knew nothing about at the time. For the next three months, she taught herself about testing from searching online and came across the North West Tester Gathering on Meetup. For the first six months, she turned up and just sat at the back.
A couple of months later, Amy was experiencing first-hand the community feel of volunteer-run meetup events like the North West Tester Gathering. Her confidence grew. She was learning and meeting new people simultaneously. A year or so later and she was asked to join the organising committee and then became chief-organiser in 2019, leading the group to merge and become Ministry of Testing Manchester.
