Sean has had a very varied and exciting journey where he acquired many valuable skills and experiences.
Starting as a musician, Sean spent a lot of time singing and playing his guitar in pubs, clubs and leisure centres around the UK and Europe in various punk bands and orchestras.
Sean also had a few jobs here and there driving cherry pickers in factories (a lot of fun), and even part-time worked with the job centre helping people find meaningful work.
At the same time, Sean used to volunteer at a college teaching functional Maths and English to help people with severe learning difficulties keep hold of their apprenticeship roles.
Sean also volunteered in a school in a very deprived area, using music and performance to help build up confidence and aspiration in the students.
From there, he took his first steps into business, first with a small Café in Bath, then onto a large public house.
With a bit of business acumen in his toolbelt, Sean moved into business intelligence within the banking and insurance sectors.
As a proficient programmer with more and more of his time spent coding, it made sense to take the plunge (and large pay cut at the time) to spend time doing what he loved; developing software.
As an autistic man, being able to work mainly in silence or playing music with headphones on, coding was the perfect role; and once he started coding full-time, he became rather good at it.
After helping build a consultancy from a bedroom in Brighton to a now large consultancy across Europe, Sean decided it was time to go out on his own.
Since going solo, he has been leading and architecting amazing projects worldwide from offices in London and Manhattan.
He also became an author of books for young neuro-diverse children to help with everyday fears such as haircuts, nail clipping, food fears etc. which have been surprisingly successful and provide a steady income stream which he passes on to charity each month – this particular one being on the Amazon children's best-sellers list a few times Hair, hair, let's cut that hair: A fun rhyming poem for children about having a hair cut; including some silly things that might happen if their hair gets too long: 4 (Little Monster Rhymes): McAlinden, Sean: Amazon.co.uk: Books.
As lockdown hit and the economic realities started to cause real suffering and hardship, Sean took off his headphones and looked around and knew he had to do something to help; what would be the point of all the success and learning if he could not put it to some good use.
Sean started to get more involved in the world, especially with his children's schools.
His youngest's school was of particular interest as it is a Special Educational Needs school which was already very close to Sean's heart.
Whilst voluntarily teaching coding and helping manage IT work experience at the school for a client; he learned in more detail the excellent work and passion of the leadership and staff; however, he also knew that upon leaving education, all that work and passion was let down significantly by a world where alumni of these schools and colleges typically have very little chance of employment and fulfilling lives.
This was the beginning of Xtrable.