ITWC web operative Prathep Thurairatnam and his family first arrived in Canada in 1990, when he was five years old, as Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka.

He didn’t return again until last year, for his wedding.

“It felt like the first time I actually went,” he says. “I came here when I was small, so my entire life I’ve been a Canadian. I was raised here, I went to school here, and pretty much everyone I know is here.”

As part of ITWC’s web ops team, Thurairatnam is responsible for placing ads, measuring audience engagement, and generating analytics reports.

He also builds a weekly newsletter comprised of the top five articles on IT World Canada in a given week, and plays a significant role with the company’s billing department: It’s his job at the end of each month to ensure clients such as Rogers Communications Inc. and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are billed for sponsored content, and to produce end-of-campaign reports.

“Originally when I started my main focus was supposed to be billing, while occasionally assisting with traffic, but over the years I’ve been doing more analytics,” he says.

Thurairatnam began his career with ITWC in 2012, after being introduced to the company by Arnab Tagore, a friend and former classmate who was serving as a consultant for ITWC at the time. (He currently works at RBC.)

“I wanted to work with computers, but not in a way that was too technical, where I’m programming every single time,” Thurairatnam says. “ITWC offered a balance of both, so when [Tagore] said there was an opening I applied right away – and because of him, I was able to get in.”

One of Thurairatnam’s favourite parts of working at ITWC is the freedom the company gives him to complete his tasks however he sees fit, often by encouraging him to create VBA, PHP or python scripts, for example, that allow him to deliver reports at a much faster rate than when he started four years ago.

“Originally when I came here billing reports would take me two weeks,” he says. “And my friends have told me about other companies where, although you could make the workload easier, they won’t let you streamline it. But ITWC is one of those places that doesn’t get involved so long as the work is done, and now my billing reports take only two days.”

Which, he acknowledges, might be part of the reason for his increased traffic-monitoring duties.

In his spare time Thurairatnam, who earned both a certificate in computer programming applications at Ryerson University and a diploma in electrical engineering from Toronto’s Centennial College, enjoys programming mobile apps – nothing fancy, but enough for him to learn new programming languages.

“Most of the things I’ve been working on now have been web and app design,” he says.

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