Software Engineer Apprentice Review

My role is to work in a team of other apprentices and graduates where we have been tasked to work on an education project that will help the company's HR department. This involves having a daily stand-up each morning to discuss what was completed the day before and the tasks we are aiming to work on next. As a team we also have meetings with key stakeholders to get feedback on the project and to discuss any outlying problems.

During the apprenticeship I have learnt lots of key skills significant to my role. I have learnt hard skills like how to use CI/CD systems such as Concourse to continuously deploy our code using a custom pipeline. And soft skills such as how to give a presentation to technical and non-technical stakeholders and management.

The programme is the extremely enjoyable, I got a chance to travel down to London to see the Sky studios. The people I work with on a daily basis and throughout Sky are overly welcoming, interesting and kind. We have the freedom to learn about what we want to help us in improving our skills which makes the programme much more enjoyable.

I feel that the programme is very well structured. There is a series of learning labs scheduled for us throughout that each help improve our skills, thinking and mentality in the work place. This is complemented with a set a modules, which each dedicate to teaching a specific area of software development, such as Frontend, Backend and Deployment.

I receive lots of support from my manager, stakeholders, scrum master and colleagues. Someone is always available to ask a question to or available to give help and I receive regular feedback from my manager and the project stakeholders on what I could do better and what I am doing well.

I have monthly meetings with my coach who helps me set targets and goals for the month ahead. This allows me to incrementally improve and work towards competing the apprenticeship. There are 15 minute drop-in sessions I can attend to get help with writing my portfolio or to ask any questions. The training provider also has a large community forum of apprentices that you can reach out to get help on just about anything.

I went through a 12 week bootcamp set out by the training provider which taught me lots of essential foundation knowledge necessary for my role, this includes: using databases and ORMs, safe authentication of users and also how to create a plan and design to solve a problem. I also am learning a lot of new information in the learning modules that is helping me better perform in my role.

There are lots of activities to get involved with such as holiday and activities, dinners and meet ups; table tennis and pool clubs. There is also the occasional professional networking event that is open for anyone in the office to attend. However, I am home working a lot of the time which means I don't always get to attend these events.

Yes

Every part of the company has a friendly environment, there is an immense number of benefits you can get for working for Sky and there is so many opportunities to advance in your role or to move to different parts of the company and you will always be supported in what you do.

Make sure to always be yourself and to give genuine answers to any questions you get asked. If applying for the software development apprenticeship or a similar role you may want to have some prior knowledge of coding or do some practice in a programming language as there are practical parts of the process that require you to have that knowledge.