Software Engineer Review

Working customer side in a highly skilled devops environment working alongside resources from the customer team and competitors. Role involves using new technologies such as Ansible and Terraform to stand up environments within the cloud, currently using AWS with a peek in to Azure. Always a new challenge to tackle each and every day.

Over the course of the apprenticeship I've learnt many technical and soft-skills which will help give me the kick start required to be a competent engineer. A lot of the devops skills that I've learned over the last few years will allow me to stay competitive going forward, not only helping my employer to be more competitive against potential contract rivals but also help my wage increase, and allow me to take part in meaningful and rewarding work.

There is a mix to this portion, I find that whilst I enjoy the work that I do I find that a lot of the uni work isn't relevant to my current position as it's heavily Java based. If the course content was more flexible in approaching modern languages that the market is after I believe I'd enjoy the programme more than I have been. Additionally uni has a social element to it that we're missing out on, so a lot of the tasks are just seen as extra work without the fun side of uni.

There is plenty of support locally within my area as a lot of the area is made up of apprentices, this means that there's a bond between us and our employer who understand that we are working a full time job with uni on top. This allows us to make time within hours at critical times for uni throughout the year. Updates for the 20% however have been poor and very behind schedule. It'll be better for those joining later on but it's too far in to my experience to see the full benefit of it.

Mixed bag, locally within the working area the support is top notch as they have a view of your daily work and can understand the flexibility that is required to meet the goals during the working day and allow you to get on with uni work at the same time. However the team managing the GAP often take too long to provide a response leaving you with too little time to respond to the incident i.e. 20% off the job. This may be down to an issue with the amount of apprentices that they have to deal with.

Within the area I have been assigned a mentor which is brilliant as they're usually someone who has been through this experience before, so they can help you out where they've had issues previously. I'm starting to be given time within the working day to do uni work so it's not purely in my own time anymore.

The uni subjects are not relevant to my role at all, the problem there is that the course is so java focused which isn't my role. This means I'm learning my relevant skills on the job but a lot of the units expect you to improve your java skills between units on the job, this simply isn't happening and the content needs to be revisited to make it up to date with what the majority of students are doing as a part of their role.

There's plenty of extra activities but it's just hard to find time to get involved with them due to work commitments and having a life outside of work. This is a neutral point for me as whilst they're available I'm fine with no taking part in them.

Yes

Whilst I do have issues with that I'd like to see improved, I do have a positive view of my experience. I think it heavily depends on your working area, however I feel the pay is good (although somewhat behind industry standard for certain roles) but with a free degree and plenty of experience and people pushing for you to get certifications I think that Cap is a good employer to start with.

If you're applying for a software engineer role I'd look in to doing some free training content available via udemy, this way you could hit the ground running in to some of the more future facing roles such as ones within the cloud space. Even a basic understanding of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. would go a long way