Industrial Placement - Technology Professional Review

My role is programming depending on workload you will either be assigned small tasks to do which then you write unit tests for, for larger tasks you may work alongside other programmers. This will then be reviewed and if there are comments you will work on those before they are deployed. As well as this I have had tasks updating documentation and working on bugs

I had not previously programmed in Java, and have learnt about html also. I have used a number of development programs as well including intelij and postman. There has been lots of online learning where i could choose what to study

At several points I would be given no work due to disorganisation on my team and so for sometimes weeks at a time I would be working on online courses or doing small admin tasks like updating documentation for the wider team. I have had some responsibility since swapping teams however it is pretty much based on luck if you will be given work to do or told to do online learning

Some team members have really made an effort to teach me and give me work to do. We have older grad buddies who we could go to for help and some of the senior developers are happy to help where as others ignore your messages (this has happened to a number of new starters across different teams this year). My line managers have been great.

The people I work with and the office environment was for sure the best part of the placement, I've made friends I will definitely keep in contact with after my placement, and there was a night out at the start of the year. Coming into the office was good at the start of the year as you could socialise and help each other but this has been interrupted due to covid and office renovation

I wish I had worked for a smaller company as at the end of this year I genuinely don't know if I would consider the year out of uni at all beneficial to myself other than being able to save some money and live in a new place. I really made some good friends but do not think I have learnt enough to consider the year a success

No

The money and career progression opportunities post grad scheme are great but I would seriously suggest applying to a company more willing to give new starters actual work and monitoring their progression to make sure they are using their time properly. It's not the fault of the line managers but there is too many people to keep track of if people are actually getting work